A key discovery in the fight against HIV/AIDS

A recent discovery from the University of Sherbrooke rekindles hope for finding a definitive solution to the AIDS pandemic. These encouraging results come after more than 30 years of efforts in laboratories worldwide to find the "keys" to HIV latency.


The research team of Brendan Bell, professor-researcher at the Department of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases at the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at the University of Sherbrooke, has been working for over 10 years on a deeper understanding of this virus that attacks the body's immune system.

This team has discovered a molecular "key" that plays an important role in controlling the active replication or dormant state of the virus. The dormant, or latent, state constitutes the main obstacle to curing HIV and is a major problem for vaccine development against it.

During latency, the virus integrates into our own DNA and cannot be targeted by currently available antiretroviral drugs (ARVs). Moreover, HIV's ability to quickly establish latency in the human body allows the virus to hide from our immune system.

In 2022, an estimated 39 million people were living with the HIV virus, and 630,000 people died from AIDS-related causes.

In 2012, Professor Bell's laboratory had discovered a molecular "lock" within the HIV genome and demonstrated that a complex of proteins in our cells could be hijacked by HIV to unlock it, allowing the virus to exit from its latent state and enter active replication.


To identify these proteins, the researchers used meticulous biochemical and proteomic approaches to purify and target several new proteins that control HIV latency. This discovery had earned him the title of Personality of the Year in the field of science awarded by La Presse and Radio-Canada.

Every lock has its key

The team's recent results were published in the international journal PLOS Pathogens. In collaboration with Professor Pierre Lavigne's team from the Department of Biochemistry and Functional Genomics at UdeS, they demonstrated that the protein complex specifically recognizes the central promoter region of HIV, like a key specifically recognizes a lock.

According to Professor Brendan Bell, "each of these protein 'keys' represents a new possibility to develop small molecules that could help keep the virus in a deep dormant state by locking it, or alternatively to activate the virus to eliminate it with drugs or immune therapies. This is a fundamental advance in the fight against HIV, the result of 20 years of relentless research."

International collaborations are underway to translate the discovery of these proteins into clinically useful molecules. If successful, the work could offer new perspectives to fight other distinct viruses, such as herpes, which also evade the immune system by hiding in the body in a latent form.