Some Properties of the Class of Corona Viruses As Discussed in the Primary Scientific Literature.
The World Scientific Publishing Community is unlocking many papers to make them accessible to the general public and scientists.
Yesterday, it was reported that a patient hospitalized in a hospital a few kilometers from my home was a Covid-19 patient. Happily this proved not to be the case; while the patient is sick, the testing ultimately proved negative which was announced this morning.
Although I'm not paralyzed by fear of Covid-19, even though if I were to get it I would fall into an "at risk" category - this information inspired me to pull up some scientific papers about these viruses in the hope that increased understanding them will help me answer the questions that people around me ask about these sorts of things.
In my career it was my privilege to have worked on the development - note the difference between development and discovery - of some of the earliest antiviral drugs, many of which were developed to treat HIV. I was mostly involved in the protease inhibitors, my main contributions being to facilitate the industrial synthesis of nelfinavir and saquinavir, as well as some work connected with the scale up of ritinovir and indinavir. These drugs all are isosteres of a particular protein sequence containing a sequence of amino acids containing the amino acids phenylalanine and proline (Phe-Pro or FP). An "isostere" is a compound that has a very similar shape and distribution of electronic charge to another molecule: Many drugs are designed to be isosteric with metabolic molecules important in human disease.
The amino acids phenylalanine and proline are cleaved in a precursor protein synthesized from coding genes in the HIV virus - interestingly there are very few proteases in mammals that can effect this cleavage - in order to make the active proteins that facilitate the viruses reproduction.
It was also my privilege to have been the first person to synthesize a key intermediate of a prodrug - a "prodrug" is a medication that is designed to improve its bioavailability but must undergo metabolic changes in order to become an active drug - that later was used (on a multiple ton scale) in the synthesis a commercial NRTI (Nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor) that saved the eyesight of immune compromised patients. I am very proud that my work helped speed this drug to market.
That is the real reward of working in the pharmaceutical industry; you help save people's lives and/or prevent their disability.
I am not a virologist, nor, really a molecular biologist, but I have always made it my practice to work to understand, within my limits, the basic science of a whole program beyond the fraction in which I am involved. In this way I have learned, by osmosis, a fair amount of virology, physiology and molecular biology.
Anyway. Scientific issues are often mangled by journalists - sometimes in ways that prove to be quite tragic - and having an intellectually impaired psychopathic President of the United States in the present case is making disinformation and ignorance even worse than normal.
I have made it my habit to utilize primary sources whenever possible to understand not only the scientific issues directly or peripherally involved with my work, but many other issues that involve science or engineering that impact human lives; for example many of my posts here are about climate change and nuclear engineering, subjects to which I have applied my education to understand on a fairly deep level without having my paycheck involved in any way.
I will not have time to go through the papers I will link now; but I believe they are all open sourced so that people who are interested can see what is really going on. Covid-19 did not spring from nowhere, it is a close relative of viruses that have caused severe human diseases before, the MERS and SARS diseases. This is in a way, very good news, since this means we do not come to this disease unarmed as we did with the emergence of AIDS.
Here are links to the papers, which are review articles, articles written by scientists for scientists that discuss and assimilate the papers published in an area to give a scientific overview:
SARS and MERS: recent insights into emerging coronaviruses (Emmie de Wit1, Neeltje van Doremalen1, Darryl Falzarano2 and Vincent J. Munster1, Nature Reviews Microbiology volume 14, pages 523–534 (2016))
Epidemiology, Genetic Recombination, and Pathogenesis of Coronaviruses (Gao et al Trends in Microbiology, June 2016, Vol. 24, No. 6 490-502)
An up to date, "on the ground" article from the University of Wuhan: Emerging coronaviruses: Genome structure, replication, and pathogenesis (Guo et al, J Med Virol. 2020;92:418–423.)
To show that we are not entirely unarmed, and that we've been looking at a generalized approach to addressing viruses in this class, here's yet another paper, from Gilead, a company that has been at the forefront of treating viral diseases:
Broad-spectrum antiviral GS-5734 inhibits both epidemic and zoonotic coronaviruses (Sheahan et al., Science Translational Medicine 28 Jun 2017: Vol. 9, Issue 396, eaal3653)
Gilead commercialized, but did not discover, a cure for Hepatitis C. How wonderful is that, a terrible disease has been cured?
I recognize that most people don't live day to day in the world of science, and some of this stuff may seem a little esoteric. I have a pretty good feel for what's going on in these papers, and to the extent possible, should anyone be interested and have a question, I will work to frame an answer to questions, but probably not tonight, as I've had a lot on my plate the last few days and am rather tired.
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That's the one thing that would be really helpful for my understanding at least. I found nothing at the CDC and WHO.
Things like doorknobs, rails, plastics, and, of course, toilet seats 
Does light, temperature make any difference?
It's such a new virus I suspect the answer is not yet known, but if it is known, I'd like to know it too!
