Once upon a time, there was a bad sorcerer who had a magic necklace. He wanted to use it to cast a spell on everyone. To do this, he needed many copies of the necklace. So, he forced a slave to make more of them.
There were gems of four different colors. The slave had to put them together in a very special order. Only then would the necklace have its magic power.
A good wizard did not want the sorcerer to make the world suffer. He threw many fake red gems near the slave. These fake gems looked like the real ones, but they were not.
Sometimes the slave picked a fake gem by mistake. When that happened, the necklace could only hold a few more gems. The new necklace could not be finished, so this slowed down the sorcerer’s plan.
The wizard won a small battle against the sorcerer. This small win brought hope that one day, the sorcerer’s evil plan would be defeated for good.
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You have just learned how a new drug slows the spread of the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 in a human body. In our story, the sorcerer represents the coronavirus, and his magic necklace stands for the virus’s RNA.
RNA is a long molecule that holds all the instructions for making a copy of the virus. Imagine it as an open necklace made up of many pieces. These pieces are the gems, which represent four different types of molecules called nucleotides in the RNA.
The red gem in the necklace represents adenine, one of the four nucleotides. The slave in our tale is like an enzyme called polymerase. An enzyme is a protein that acts like a tool to control chemical reactions. Polymerase copies the RNA, one nucleotide at a time.
The slave works inside a human host cell—a cell taken over by the virus. And finally, the wizard in the story and the fake red gems is the drug remdesivir, which slows down the virus by interfering with this copying process.
©2020 Dr. Michael Herrera
For a more detailed description of how remdesivir works, go to the Treatments page.