4/18/17, Daily Mail.com
The slime from a rare species of frog could be used to develop drugs that cure the flu, new research claims.
Scientists have long known that frog mucus holds powerful peptides that defend them against bacteria.
But
now a team of US scientists has found mucus secreted by the hydrophylax
bahuvistara frog, native to southern India, can destroy many strains of
human flu and protect mice against flu infection.
The
researchers say anti-flu peptides could be useful when vaccines are
unavailable, in the case of a new pandemic strain, or when circulating
strains become resistant to current drugs.
A
team of US scientists has found mucus secreted by the hydrophylax
bahuvistara frog, native to India (pictured), can destroy many strains
of human flu and protect mice against the flu
Flu
specialist and study co-author Joshy Jacob of Emory University School
of Medicine in Atlanta said: 'Different frogs make different peptides,
depending on where their habitat is. You and I make host defence
peptides ourselves.
'It's
a natural innate immune mediator that all living organisms maintain. We
just happened to find one that the frog makes that just happens to be
effective against the H1 influenza type.'
Practically all animals make a few anti-microbial host defence peptides as part of their innate immune systems.
Frogs
have drawn the most attention as a source of peptides, because it's
relatively easy to isolate the peptides from their mucus
For
the research, which appears in the journal Immunity, Dr Jacob and his
colleagues screened 32 frog defence peptides against an influenza strain
and found that four of them had flu-busting abilities.
He
said: 'I was almost knocked off my chair. In the beginning, I thought
that when you do drug discovery, you have to go through thousands of
drug candidates, even a million, before you get one or two hits. And
here we did 32 peptides, and we had four hits.'
Dr
Jacob and his colleagues named one of the antiviral peptides they
identified urumin, after a whip-like sword called 'urumi' used in
southern India centuries ago.
When delivered intra-nasally, urumin protected unvaccinated mice against a lethal dose of some flu viruses.
Urumin
was specific for H1 strains of flu, such as the 2009 pandemic strain,
and was not effective against other current strains such as H3N2.
Developing
antimicrobial peptides into effective drugs has been a challenge in the
past, partly because enzymes in the body can break them down.
Dr
Jacob's lab is now exploring ways to stabilise antiviral peptides such
as urumin, as well as looking for frog-derived peptides that are active
against other viruses like dengue and Zika.
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