Recently, there has been some news on the Internet about the treatment of the COVID-19 infections by one sort of medicine "Remdesivir", which is produced by the American company Gilead. At present, Gilead has applied for a number of patents for the drug "Remdesivir". From the public literature, Gilead has carried out a relatively comprehensive patent layout on the compound of the drug "Remdesivir" and its therapeutic use, while the efficacy of "Remdesivir" on the COVID-19 infections still needs clinical trials.After the outbreak of the COVID-19 in Wuhan, Wuhan Virus Institute filed a patent application for "Uses against 2019 Novel Coronavirus" on January 21, 2020. The patent application itself is compliant and legal. However, whether the patent application can be authorized has yet to be examined, and this move is not of high value for breaking patent barriers and safeguarding national interests.The above implications for Chinese pharmaceutical enterprises are as follows: first, Gilead's emphasis on basic R & D and high-quality patent layout is worth learning; second, the basic R & D capacity of antiviral drugs in China needs to be enhanced; third, the awareness of intellectual property rights in the whole society needs to be improved.
