An Odyssey in antiviral drug development—50 years at the Rega Institute: 1964–2014

I entered the Rega Institute for Medical Research in August 1964, as a medical student, to start working under the guidance of Prof. Piet De Somer, then professor of microbiology at the Leuven School of Medicine. When I graduated as medical doctor (MD) in 1966, I hesitated between a clinical career in Internal Medicine or a scientific career in experimental research, the latter under the tutorship of Prof. De Somer who persuaded me to work on interferon (inducers). The discovery of the interferon-inducing capacity of doublestranded RNAs, such as poly(I) poly(C), by Maurice Hilleman's group at Merck in 1967 would prove of key importance in my decision to engage in interferon research. In 1968 I described the induction of interferon by polyacrylic acid and polymethylacrylic acid; one year after Thomas C. Merigan at Stanford University had described interferon induction by pyran copolymer. As a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford (from 1968 till 1970), I discovered, with T.C. Merigan, several new polynucleotides as inducers of interferon. Upon my return to Leuven at the end of 1970, I picked up a new line of research, that of the reverse transcriptase (RT), which had just been