President Trump, hospitalized at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Maryland, is being treated with remdesivir, an antiviral drug made by Gilead Sciences. While the drug hasn't been approved by the Food and Drug Administration, it was authorized for emergency use in May for treating hospitalized patients with the coronavirus.
Trump received his first IV infusion of remdesivir on Friday night, and doctors say he'll undergo a five-day treatment course of the drug.
How does remdesivir work? By making it harder for the virus to replicate. Typically, when SARS-CoV-2 invades a cell, it releases a strand of RNA containing its genome — essentially, a genetic blueprint for replicating itself.
In order for the virus to make copies, its RNA needs to latch onto a cell's ribosome. That's a tiny cellular machine that lives in human cells and creates proteins. A single cell can contain millions of ribosomes, which, when things are working normally, help create the normal cells of the human body. But the coronavirus hijacks the ribosome, directing it to make copies of itself — and then copies of those copies.
Each compromised cell can create thousands of copies of the virus, which then infect nearby cells, where replication begins again.