Calin lives in the Romanian city of Cluj. He suffers from melanoma and his mother died from colorectal cancer, aged 58. “It took two months just for a colonoscopy,” he recalls.

AIDS research has attempted many strategies to tackle the HIV virus infection. Now, a new type of vaccine developed within an EU-funded project, called EuroNeut-41 , is based on one of the envelope proteins of the HIV virus , called the gp41 protein.