Most antiviral drugs are built from scratch in laboratories. Researchers at the Montreal Clinical Research Institute (IRCM) may have found something better hiding in plants — an entirely unknown family of natural molecules with up to 25 times the antiviral activity of existing compounds against Ebola and SARS-CoV-2.

The discovery, reported by Phys.org, emerged from the IRCM’s ongoing search for novel antiviral agents derived from natural sources. Affiliated with the Université de Montréal, the team describes the molecules as an entirely new family — not a tweak to known compounds but a previously unidentified chemical class. The most potent candidates showed antiviral activity up to 25 times stronger than reference compounds, according to the researchers.

The finding arrives at a moment of renewed urgency. Concerns about the rapid emergence of new pandemics have accelerated interest in broad-spectrum antivirals — drugs effective against multiple virus families rather than a single pathogen. A new molecular family, rather than a single isolated compound, gives scientists a broader structural template to refine, potentially yielding multiple drug candidates down the line.

Plant-derived medicines have a long pedigree: aspirin from willow bark, the antimalarial artemisinin from sweet wormwood. Yet modern antiviral development has shifted heavily toward synthetic chemistry and computational drug design. The Montreal team’s work is a reminder that nature’s molecular archives still hold chapters nobody has read.

The work is at an early stage, and the path from laboratory potency to a usable drug typically runs years long. But discovering a new family of molecules — rather than one promising compound — opens a wider corridor for future research. If the activity holds through later-stage studies, drug developers may have an entirely new scaffold to build on.