A team led by Akiko Iwasaki of Yale University and former Yale researcher Charles Dela Cruz has successfully tested the effectiveness of neomycin, a common antibiotic, in preventing or treating respiratory viral infections in animal models when administered to animals. nasally. They then found that the same nasal approach, this time applying the over-the-counter Neosporin ointment, also triggers a rapid immune response in the noses of healthy people via interferon-stimulated genes (ISG).
“It’s an interesting finding: that a cheap, over-the-counter antibiotic ointment can stimulate the human body to activate an antiviral response,” said Iwasaki, Sterling Professor of Immunobiology and professor of dermatology at the Yale School of Medicine and Science and co-senior author of the study. new study, the results of which have been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“Our work supports the preventive and therapeutic actions of neomycin against viral diseases in animal models and shows effective blocking of infection and transmission,” said Iwasaki, who is also a professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Yale, professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health and investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Stop the infection in the nose before it spreads
Every year millions of people are infected with a respiratory virus. The global COVID-19 pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus has caused 774.5 million cases worldwide as of February 2024, with a global mortality of 6.9 million people. Influenza viruses cause up to five million cases of severe illness and 500,000 deaths annually worldwide.
Currently, most therapies used to combat respiratory viral infections (including antivirals, monoclonal antibodies, and convalescent plasma therapy) are administered intravenously or orally and focus on stopping the progression of existing infections, But a therapy administered directly into the nose has a much better chance of stopping infections before they can spread to the lower respiratory tract and cause serious illness, researchers have noted.
“Our findings suggest that we could optimize this cheap, generic antibiotic to prevent viral diseases and their spread in human populations”
“This multidisciplinary collaborative work combined important insights from lung infection modeling experiments in animals with evaluation of human studies of this intranasal approach to boosting antiviral immunity,” said Dela Cruz, former associate professor of pulmonary, critical care, and sleep and of microbial pathogenesis at Yale School of Medicine and former director of the Pulmonary Infection Research and Treatment Center. Dela Cruz is currently at the University of Pittsburgh.
In their study, the researchers found that mice treated intranasally with neomycin showed a robust ISG line of defense against SARS-CoV-2 and a highly virulent strain of influenza A virus. The researchers also found that an intranasal treatment with neomycin strongly mitigated contact transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in hamsters.
In healthy humans, intranasal application of Neosporin (containing neomycin) also initiated strong ISG expression in a subset of volunteers, the researchers said. “Our findings suggest that we could optimize this cheap, generic antibiotic to prevent viral diseases and their spread in human populations, especially in global communities with limited resources,” Iwasaki said. “This approach, because it is host-directed, should work no matter what the virus is,” she concludes.
