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.