Those Nucleoside Analogues — I
By Nana Dadzie Ghansah
Gilead calls it GS-5734. Once it is injected into the body, it gets converted into its active form called GS-441524.
It is known broadly as the drug “Remdesivir” and it is a nucleoside analogue.
So what is a nucleoside analogue? To get to that, we’ll need to do some basic molecular biology. This means this post will be in two parts.
Here we go:
Proteins play a very integral part in the growth, development, and health of all organisms. They are the basis of a lot of functions and structures in all organisms.
They are so important that all organisms (and even viruses) have a very special way of controlling when and where needed proteins are built.
This is done through a coding system stored in the nucleus of every cell in the organism. Whereas computers used letters, numbers, and symbols, organisms use chemicals called nucleotides.
Nucleotides are complex compounds that are made up of 3 parts: a phosphate group, a sugar with up of 5 carbon molecules, and a nitrogen base. The nitrogen base in a nucleotide decides its name. There are four main bases: guanine, adenine, cytosine, and thymine and their symbols are G, A, C and T. These nucleotides are stringed together like a chain and in the human…
