Long before COVID-19 became a part of the global vernacular, it was prominent in Texas A&M University chemist Wenshe Liu’s mind.
Three months ago as the new year dawned, Liu was hard at work on two papers, one published by ChemRxiv in late January that first identified the drug remdesivir — originally developed by Gilead Sciences as the solution for a previous global pandemic in 2014, Ebola — as the only viable medicine for treating SARS-CoV-2, which is the virus that causes COVID-19.
As a chemical biologist specializing in medicinal chemistry, Liu’s primary research target is cancer. However, the late-January lockdown of Wuhan, China, as the epicenter of the looming [...]
