When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, one of the first medicines doctors turned to was remdesivir, part of a family of medicines called nucleoside analogues that are also used to treat HIV, hepatitis and some cancers.

These drugs are especially important because there are a surprisingly limited arsenal of drugs that reliably fight viral infections. That’s one of the main reasons why new viral outbreaks cause so much alarm.

For nearly a decade, our chemistry research group — The Britton Lab at Simon Fraser University — has been developing faster ways to build nucleoside analogues. In 2020, we published a method that bypassed most of the traditional steps, reducing the time needed to build these kinds of molecules from months to about a week.

Now, in a new paper published in the journal Science in collaboration with scientists at biopharmaceutical firm Merck, we took this a step further. We have now developed a modular approach that turns one cheap starting material into a wide range of finished drug candidates within weeks. Using this method, we made dozens of new molecules and, in early laboratory tests, identified three with promising anti-HIV activity.

Nucleosides are the molecular building blocks of DNA and RNA. Nucleoside........

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