Since HIV-1 protease inhibitors (PI), but not reverse transcriptase inhibitors (RTI), have been reported to block Akt activation in several cell types, such as peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) and monocytes/macrophages [13,15,16,17,18,19], we assessed the potential role of PIs as immunomodulators in addition to their antiviral effect in HIV-1 infection. Here, AKT1 is linked to HIV-1 infection.