Infectious disease doctor Annie Luetkemeyer ’90 is among those studying remdesivir for treatment of COVID-19.

Michael Matros

Annie Luetkemeyer ’90 had been leading studies of the drug remdesivir for use against viral hepatitis and other diseases when the COVID-19 pandemic reached the West Coast. A professor of medicine and infectious diseases at the University of California, San Francisco, Luetkemeyer works daily as an infectious-disease doctor at San Francisco General Hospital.

It wasn’t a surprise when the first cases arrived there. “When we saw human transmission in January,” she says, “we all were bracing for this to spread around the world and become the common issue we hoped it wouldn’t be.”

Even without data to confirm the drug’s effectiveness against the new disease, Luetkemeyer explains, she and her colleagues wanted to have more remdesivir on hand. “It seemed like the best possible option,” she says. So she and her colleagues contacted Gilead, the drug’s developer, and joined the COVID-19 study sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. “This is the first treatment of any kind we’ve seen that might work,” she says. “So I think it’s a really big deal. We need a whole lot more information, but I think this feels a little bit like the early days of the HIV epidemic.”

In her years as an AIDS doctor, she says, “we went from having literally nothing to treat people to having the drug AZT. AZT was not the cure-all, right? But even having AZT in our arsenal really was a game changer to say, ‘Look, there’s something we can do to try to control this virus.’”

So, she says, remdesivir could be used as a standard of care for some patients, “and then any other treatment would be layered on top of that.” Without sufficient personal protective equipment as of early May, Luetkemeyer has been unable to speak with her patients in their treatment rooms.

“So I will stand outside of the room,” she says, “and look through the window and talk to them on the phone, which is very bizarre.” She knows, however, that it’s worse for the patients, especially those facing death.

“They’re really isolated,” she says. “We try to allow some family members if that’s the case, but it’s been really challenging. This is a scary enough disease. And then to have to go through it alone, without your loved ones, is really hard.”