Of the two major types of HIV, only one, HIV-1, typically causes AIDS in infected people who don't receive treatment. A study reveals how HIV-1 escapes detection by essentially becoming invisible to a patient's immune system, whereas HIV-2 triggers protective immune responses in patients. This understanding of how HIV-1's "invisibility cloak" works could lead to the development of effective vaccines against HIV-1.In the new study, Manel and his team focused on the capsid—the protein shell of a virus that encloses its genetic material. By mutating HIV-1 and HIV-2 capsids, they discovered that these viral proteins control the ability of dendritic cells to sense the viruses and activate immune responses.

The researchers found that the HIV-1 capsid allows the virus to escape detection by dendritic cells under normal conditions. But when they mutated the HIV-1 and HIV-2 capsids, the dendritic cells produced immune responses without getting infected by the viruses. These cells relied on a protein called cyclic GMP-AMP synthase (cGAS) to sense the viral DNA in the cytosol before the foreign DNA became integrated into the host genome.

These findings open new avenues for the development of effective treatments against HIV-1. "By modifying the capsid of a virus, we could engineer a virus that is both better recognized by the immune system and that has also lost its ability to infect cells," Manel says. "Beyond capsid-mutated viruses, our results suggest that activating the cGAS pathway in dendritic cells could induce immunity against HIV-1."