(cache)‘There’s a cocktail out there that can cure this’: Inside a UCSF-led quest to exploit the coronavirus’ weak spots

1of6Nevan Krogan, a UCSF virus expert, led the study to find the virus’ weaknesses and potential drugs to halt its spread.Photo: Gabrielle Lurie / The Chronicle

2of6A member of the UCSF-led coronavirus research team captured these striking images with an electron microscope. They show African green monkey cells infected with the virus, revealing that the virus creates stringy structures called filopodia that poke holes in the cell and fill up with viral particles that “bud” out to infect other cells. The images are some of the clearest yet that show how the virus takes over its host and reprograms it to replicate and spread.Photo: Elizabeth Fischer / NIAID/NIH

3of6Nevan Krogan, a molecular biologist at UCSF, with an image showing the coronavirus as it attaches to a cell and branches out.Photo: Gabrielle Lurie / The Chronicle

How, exactly, does the coronavirus hijack and reprogram human cells to sicken and kill?

This question has obsessed Nevan Krogan since February, when the UCSF virus expert and his colleagues realized, before many did, that things in America would get very bad very fast.

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Since then, the question has only grown more urgent, and for the past four months, Krogan and an ever-expanding team of scientific collaborators in San Francisco and around the world have turned their labs upside down, prying out secrets of the virus that might point to a cure.