The pandemic of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) has been devastating for the last two decades in a number of developing countries and constituting a grand challenge to the public health.WHO/UNAIDS estimates that approximately 33.2million people were living with HIV-1 infection by the end of 2007 and almost 2.5 million new infections occurred in 2007. An unprecedented scientifc challenge for the AIDS vaccine community is how to develop an effective HIV vaccine that can block HIV transmission and consequently stop the continuing spread of HIV-1.The recent failure of Merck Phase Ⅱ B trial alerted the HIV vaccine community that new vaccine strategies need to be more exclusively explored. In this review, we outline the basics of HIV vaccine and retrospect the history of the road to HIV vaccine in last two decades,and highlight the challenges we are currently facing and new strategies to develop HIV vaccines in this field.The Institute of Biomedical Sciences, Fudan University, Shanghai