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How do protease inhibitors work?
Protease inhibitors are antiviral drugs. They interrupt the way HIV uses a healthy cell to make more virus. When HIV enters a healthy cell, its only goal is to make more viruses to infect other healthy cells. It does this by making the cell produce certain proteins the virus can use to copy itself. Two of the proteins used by the virus are reverse transcriptase and protease. The goal of the protease inhibitor is to stop the protease from helping to assemble a new virus.
The diagram above shows the virus entering the cell (1), the cell making new proteins (2-3), the proteins forming a new virus (4) and the cell releasing the new virus to infect other cells (5). It also shows some steps in the process that can be interrupted by protease inhibitors and other antiviral drugs (reverse transcriptase inhibitors) that are taken along with protease inhibitors.
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