Autophagy has become relevant in HIV-1 infection, since it is clearly involved in the late stages of the viral life cycle (i.e., replication and viral egress), preventingviral infection in CD4+ T cells and favoring viral replication in macrophages (Zhou and Spector, 2008; Espert et al., 2009; Kyei et al., 2009; Valera et al., 2015; Mailler et al., 2019; Marrero-Hernández et al., 2019; Chen et al., 2020). The gene discussed is CD4; the disease is HIV-1 infection.