Remdesivir was once championed by scientists across the globe. But when the antiviral drug, originally designed to treat both hepatitis and a common respiratory virus proved useless against those diseases, it was consigned to the pharmaceutical scrap heap. One virologist, however, continued his research on it. Professor of Paediatrics and Microbiology at the Vanderbilt University Medical Centre in Tennessee, United States, Mark Denison began hunting for a drug to treat COVID-19 almost a decade before the contagion hit the world in December 2019. Denison is an expert on the deadly Coronavirus family, members of which previously caused the SARS-CoV-1 outbreak in 2002 and the MERS-CoV (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus) epidemic in 2012. He was certain that the viral group would emerge soon, this time, with deadlier consequences. So, he got to work in 2013. Four years later, he found that remdesivir could shut down the replicating machinery of several Coronavirus variants. 

When an alarm was raised about SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) in January last year, Denison already had a potential treatment.