The world was rocked by the COVID-19 pandemic this year, but researchers rose to all manner of challenges.

Harvey Alter, Michael Houghton, and Charles Rice share the Physiology or Medicine award for their contributions to identifying the virus and demonstrating that it was responsible for hepatitis among blood transfusion recipients.

Citizen advocates push the pharmaceutical company to examine a compound that has been used to treat certain coronavirus infections in cats.

Machine learning has pegged existing drugs to repurpose for COVID-19 clinical trials.

Gilead’s experimental antiviral drug shortened the average time it took COVID-19 patients to recover in a NIAID-sponsored trial. There was weak evidence that it also helped reduce deaths.

President Donald Trump has touted the drug as a treatment but scientists still don’t know for sure that it is effective in patients. A number of clinical trials aim to find out.

The antiviral disables RNA replication machinery in MERS and SARS viruses. Can it beat back SARS-CoV-2?

Under careful watch of the World Health Organization, doctors will test a range of COVID-19 therapies, including HIV and flu antivirals, blood plasma infusions, and traditional Chinese medicines.

Combining the medications improved conditions in patients with severe 2019-nCoV infections, say doctors in Thailand.

This previously unknown mechanism for spotting foreign genetic material in the cytoplasm launches antiviral defenses even when the well-known immune mediator STING is absent.

Roughly a quarter of 38 viral samples from people treated with Xofluza had mutations in their genomes that made the pathogens less susceptible to the drug.

REGN-EB3 and mAb114 reduced mortality in a clinical trial carried out during the ongoing outbreak in Democratic Republic of Congo.

A new study finds that more than 200 human-targeted, non-antibiotic drugs inhibit the growth of bacterial species that make up part of the human microbiome.

One dose of the medication, called Xofluza, cripples influenza by interfering with an enzyme critical for viral replication.  

T-cell therapies are not just for cancer. Researchers are also advancing immunotherapy methods to protect bone marrow transplant patients from viral infections. 

Some viral pathogens modify chromatin and other epigenetic machinery, making them appealing drug targets.