As coronavirus quickly spread throughout the world, infected millions, and continue to claim thousands of lives each day, medical experts across the globe began repurposing medication. By April, remdesivir, a drug that was used to treat Ebola, was used as antiviral treatment against the virus.
Antiviral drugs go back a few decades ago to a woman named Gertrude Elion, also known as Trudy, who was responsible for the reason scientists have developed so many antivirals today. Without her work, we may not have treatment for Ebola, HIV/AIDS, hepatitis, and many others.
In 1944, Elion was hired by George Hitchings, who owned the pharmaceutical company Burroughs Wellcome, which eventually became a part of GlaxoSmithKline. Twenty-three years later, after Hitchings retired from research, Elion went on an 'antiviral odyssey' on her own, which eventually led her to win the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
She had come a long way as she struggled to get into a graduate program after studying chemistry at Hunter College due to financial hardships as a result of the Great Depression. At the time, most research laboratories would not hire women due to sexism and being told that she would only be 'a distracting influence' to male colleagues.
Elion persevered through temporary jobs to get through financially. She became a food analyst for a grocery company, worked at a doctor's office, and became a chemistry teacher in New York City high.
At the same time, she completed her master's degree at New York University. Before finally working at Burroughs Wellcome, she worked for Johnson & Johnson at the beginning of World War II since they were short on workers.
Drug Treatments
Before Elion's notable contributions to antiviral drugs, the first antibacterial treatment was penicillin. Alexander Fleming had accidentally discovered the drug, which later on became a treatment for infections such as gonorrhea and pneumonia.
In 1952, surgeon and physiologist Henri Laborit began using chlorpromazine on patients. The anesthetic, he observed, had a calming effect from patients going through surgical shock during operations and helped those with schizophrenia.
During her time with Hitchings, Elion, and the rest of the company worked on proving the hypothesis that scientists could stop harmful cells from replicating after a viral infection. She was assigned to work on purines or chemical compounds, which she only understood after several months of research.
She soon made new compounds that no scientist could recognize. Marty. St. Clair, a virologist who worked for Elion years later, shared that "Trudy was making nucleosides before we even knew what the structure of DNA was."
First Antiviral Drug
Alongside Hitchings, they invented new drugs to treat conditions from bacterial infection, malaria, rheumatoid arthritis, leukemia, malfunctioning organs, and many other serious medical conditions. The first drug they developed was 6-mercaptopurine, which remains one of the treatments for acute lymphoblastic leukemia.
The last drug she developed was acyclovir, which inhibited herpes. Keith Jerome, from the University of Washington medical school, said, "Acyclovir was the drug that changed everything in the effort to develop effective antivirals."
Today, all antiviral treatment and developments have come from Trudy's work. With the current pandemic, medical experts believe that remdesivir could open the way to develop new drugs to treat coronavirus effectively.
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