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completely prevents breakthrough cases, some vaccinated people will still get sick. If a variant comes along that the vaccine doesn't protect you from, we'll want to have treatments on hand until the vaccine can be tweaked. And, along with nonpharmaceutical interventions, therapeutics can reduce the strain on hospitals, which would prevent the overcrowding that ultimately means that some patients die who otherwise wouldn't. With good enough therapeutics, the risk of severe illness and death will drop dramatically, and countries can decide to loosen restrictions on schools and businesses, reducing the disruption to education and the economy. All of which is to say: Therapeutics are fundamentally important in an outbreak. We're lucky that scientists made COVID vaccines as quickly as they did--if they hadn't, and considering the slow progress toward effective treatments in the first two years of the pandemic, the death toll from COVID would have been far worse. To understand how we can avoid what happened with COVID, we need to take a tour through the world of therapeutics: what they are, how they get from the lab to the market, why they didn't fare better in this pandemic, and how innovation can set the stage for a better response in the future. *** We tend to think of medicines as mysterious and complex substances, but the most basic ones are remarkably simple--clusters of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and other elements that can be described using nothing more than high school chemistry. Just as water is H20 and salt is NaCl, the formula for aspirin is C9H8O4. Tylenol is C8H9NO2. Because their mass is so tiny--one