CARD8 and infection: Moreover, HIVPR cleavage of CARD8 occurs rapidly after infection such that HIVPR inhibitors and fusion inhibitors, but not reverse transcriptase (RT) inhibitors can prevent CARD8 inflammasome activation, implying that CARD8 detects HIV-1 viral protease activity of virion-packaged or “incoming” HIVPR upon virion fusion (Kulsuptrakul et al., 2023; Wang et al., 2024, 2021).