Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an infectious disease caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2).  The disease was first identified in December 2019 in Wuhan, the capital of China’s Hubei province, and has since spread globally, resulting in the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.  SARS-CoV-2 is highly infectious, and while in the majority of cases results in mild symptoms, in many cases the symptoms progress to viral pneumonia and multi-organ failure.

Virtually all treatments currently in use were originally developed for other indications, and were not designed specifically against SARS-CoV-2, and therefore have limited effectiveness.  We believe that newly designed drugs that are purposefully developed to specifically target SARS-CoV-2, enabled by recent studies of the molecular biology of the virus, will have the potential to be far more effective than repurposing existing drugs.