Remdesivir: A Review of Its Discovery and Development Leading to Emergency Use Authorization for Treatment of COVID-19

Richard T Eastman; Jacob S Roth; Kyle R Brimacombe; Anton Simeonov; Min Shen; Samarjit Patnaik; Matthew D Hall

doi:10.1021/acscentsci.0c00489

Remdesivir: A Review of Its Discovery and Development Leading to Emergency Use Authorization for Treatment of COVID-19

ACS Cent Sci. 2020 May 27;6(5):672-683. doi: 10.1021/acscentsci.0c00489. Epub 2020 May 4.

Authors

Richard T Eastman¹, Jacob S Roth^{1

2}, Kyle R Brimacombe¹, Anton Simeonov¹, Min Shen¹, Samarjit Patnaik¹, Matthew D Hall¹

Affiliations

¹ National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, National Institutes of Health, Rockville, Maryland 20850, United States.
² Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York, New York 10461, United States.

Abstract

The global pandemic of SARS-CoV-2, the causative viral pathogen of COVID-19, has driven the biomedical community to action-to uncover and develop antiviral interventions. One potential therapeutic approach currently being evaluated in numerous clinical trials is the agent remdesivir, which has endured a long and winding developmental path. Remdesivir is a nucleotide analogue prodrug that perturbs viral replication, originally evaluated in clinical trials to thwart the Ebola outbreak in 2014. Subsequent evaluation by numerous virology laboratories demonstrated the ability of remdesivir to inhibit coronavirus replication, including SARS-CoV-2. Here, we provide an overview of remdesivir's discovery, mechanism of action, and the current studies exploring its clinical effectiveness.

Publication types

Review