All Eyes On Gilead

Emergency approval of the antiviral drug remdesivir is the first good news of this pandemic. Gilead Sciences was ready

- By Robert Langreth

LAST NEW YEAR’S EVE, TOMAS CIHLAR, VICE PRESIDENT for discovery virology at Gilead Sciences Inc., received a disturbing email from a top infectious diseases expert at the University of Virginia. The researcher had been working with Cihlar on a plan to test the Gilead drug remdesivir as a treatment for Middle East respiratory syndrome, a deadly disease caused by a coronavirus. MERS had been flaring up from time to time in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere since 2012, but this email was about something more ominous. There were cases of pneumonia suddenly emerging in Wuhan, China. Watch this one, the virologist warned. It might be a new coronavirus.

Remdesivir was one of the few experimental medicines that had shown promise in lab studies against a wide variety of coronaviruses. Like the rest of the world, Gilead knew next to nothing about this new one. The World Health Organization hadn’t yet confirmed there was sustained human-to-human spread, and the extent of the outbreak in Wuhan wouldn’t become clear for weeks. Nobody knew at that point whether it would become a pandemic, but Gilead started planning on the assumption it could. Within weeks, Chief Executive Officer Daniel O’Day formed a task force to study how to test remdesivir and, if it worked, mass-produce it.