A technology developed by researchers at Temple University School of Medicine has been selected among the top 100 science stories for 2014 by Discover magazine. The technique, which hunts down HIV lingering in brain and immune cells, has the potential to eliminate the virus from the genome of individual cells.

“To rid infected cells of HIV, Temple University researchers Kamel Khalili and Wenhui Hu customized a new gene-editing method called CRISPR to snip out the entire HIV genome without harming any human genes,” stated the magazine, which ranked the discovery at No. 86 on its list of top 100 stories. “The technique, announced in July, works in brain and immune cells where the virus hides, and it could one day protect the people from future HIV infection and other viral diseases.”