Gates Package — page 1001

additional research, they learned that a substance could be derived from acetanilide that would have all the benefits without the blue hue. It was called paracetamol, which Americans know as acetaminophen, an active ingredient in Tylenol, Robitussin, Excedrin, and a dozen other products that you may have in your medicine cabinet right now. Even in modern times, drug discovery still relies on a mixture of good science and good luck. In the early 1990s, scientists at Pfizer started a clinical trial to see whether a drug called sildenafil could be used to treat cardiovascular problems by dilating the blood vessels around the heart. It worked, though men involved in the trial found that the heart wasn't the only place in their body where blood vessels were expanding. Today, in addition to treating some forms of high blood pressure, sildenafil is the active ingredient in Viagra. Unfortunately, when an outbreak appears to be headed toward a pandemic, there's no time to count on luck. We'll need to develop and test treatments as fast as possible, much faster than we did for COVID. So let's suppose we're in that situation: There's a new virus that looks like it could go global, and we need a treatment. How will scientists go about making an antiviral? The first step is to map the virus's genetic code and then, armed with that information, figure out which proteins are the most important in the life cycle of the virus. These essential proteins are known as the targets, and the search for a treatment essentially boils down to defeating the virus by finding things that will keep the targets from working the way they should. Until the 1980s, researchers trying to identify promising compounds had to get by with only a rudimentary understanding of the targets they were seeking. They would make their best educated guess and run an experiment to see if they were right; most of the time, they weren't, and they would move on to the next molecule. But the tools available for identifying the right