The mucus of a rare frog that lurks in the South Indian jungle could provide the basis of a powerful new class of drugs to combat influenza, scientists have said. The bright orange tennis ball-sized Hydrophylax bahuvistara was found to contain "host defence peptides" that proved able to destroy numerous strains of human flu, whilst protecting normal cells.
Actually, any orange frog ought to do, I would think.
Researchers are excited because the peptide showed it could bind to a protein that is identical across "dozens" of strains of the disease, increasing its potential potency as a drug.
People would be advised to treat the Keralan amphibian with caution, however, as three out of four of the peptides found in the mucus were found to be toxic to humans.
So just be careful which peptide you stick in your nose. And forget what I said about any orange frog.
Scientists at Emory University named the beneficial element "
"It’s a natural innate immune mediator that all living organisms maintain," said Josh Jacob, who co-authored the study at Emory University, Georgia.
"We just happened to find one that the frog makes that just happens to be effective against the H1 influenza type."
The virus needs hemagglutinin
The peptide works by binding to the hemagglutinin, destabilizes the virus and then kills it.
"I was almost knocked off my chair," says Jacob.
"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 1 or 2 hits.
"And here we did 32 peptides, and we had 4 hits."