Nevan Krogan, the director of the Quantitative Biosciences Institute at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) has been working since January on finding what human proteins the novel coronavirus uses to reproduce, and what drugs act as a shield. “We carried this out systematically like we’ve done many times over the last several years, looking at different viruses.
Normally that takes a couple years; we did this in a couple weeks,” Krogan said. A graduate of the University of Regina, Krogan and his team have identified 332 different human proteins that they think the virus needs in order to infect human cells.