🇸🇰Adam
Kovalčík

In a high school chemistry laboratory in Dulovce, Slovakia — a village of fewer than 2,000 people in the Nitra Region — Adam Kovalčík was working on a problem that pharmaceutical companies had not solved. Galidesivir, an experimental antiviral drug with the potential to fight Ebola, Zika, Marburg disease, and SARS-CoV-2, had been synthesized and proven effective in laboratory trials. But at $75 per gram, producing it at the scale needed for a genuine pandemic response was financially prohibitive. The synthesis required fifteen steps and nine days per batch — a recipe that made it impractical for the low- and middle-income countries where RNA virus outbreaks tend to strike hardest. Kovalčík, nineteen years old, decided to fix the chemistry.

The core of his insight was an unexpected raw material: furfuryl alcohol, a compound derived from the processing of corn husks and cobs — agricultural waste that accumulates in enormous quantities wherever corn is grown. Furfuryl alcohol is already produced industrially from corn biomass, making it cheap, renewable, and available at scale. Kovalčík's breakthrough was recognizing that its chemical structure could serve as a starting point for a stereoselective synthesis of galidesivir — a route that had not been previously described in the scientific literature.

Stereoselectivity is one of the great technical challenges of pharmaceutical chemistry. Drugs are molecules, and molecules have three-dimensional shapes. The same atoms arranged in mirror-image configurations — called enantiomers — can have completely different effects in the body: one form might be the therapeutic agent; its mirror image might be inert or even harmful. Synthesizing the correct stereoisomer preferentially, without contaminating the product with its mirror image, requires precise control of the reaction conditions. Kovalčík achieved this in his galidesivir synthesis, reducing the number of steps from fifteen to ten and cutting the production time from nine days to five.

The financial implications are substantial. At $12.50 per gram rather than $75, producing a stockpile of galidesivir for emergency outbreak response becomes feasible for governments and international health organizations that could not previously afford it. Galidesivir works by mimicking the building blocks that RNA viruses use to copy their genetic material; when the drug is incorporated into a replicating virus, it terminates the chain, halting reproduction. It has shown efficacy against a wide range of RNA viruses in preclinical and early clinical trials, making it a potential broad-spectrum antiviral — the pharmaceutical equivalent of a master key that works on multiple locks.

At the 75th annual Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair, held in Columbus, Ohio in May 2025, Kovalčík presented his synthesis in the Chemistry category. The judges awarded him the George D. Yancopoulos Innovator Award — the top individual prize at the world's largest pre-college science competition — along with $100,000. The Yancopoulos Award is given to the single project that best exemplifies innovation with genuine real-world impact. In 2023, it was awarded for exoplanet detection. In 2025, it went to a teenager from a Slovak village who had figured out how to make a pandemic-fighting drug from corn waste.

Kovalčík's work has been noted by the pharmaceutical and public health communities, not just the science fair circuit. Galidesivir is currently in human clinical trials; its developer, BioCryst Pharmaceuticals, has been working toward FDA approval. The drug has been designated a priority by the U.S. Department of Defense for biodefense applications. A cheaper, faster synthesis route — developed by a teenager working in a high school laboratory — could meaningfully accelerate its path to widespread availability. In the calculus of pandemic preparedness, where speed of production and cost of stockpiling directly determine how many lives can be saved, Kovalčík's contribution is not merely impressive. It is potentially life-saving.