Washington, Feb 2 (PTI) A compound found in the medicinal and culinary herb rosemary may potentially block the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and prevent inflammation caused by COVID-19, a preliminary study suggests.<\/p>\n
The research, published in the journal Antioxidants, found that the compound, carnosic acid, can block the interaction between the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein and the receptor protein ACE2.<\/p>\n
Spike protein is used by the SARS-CoV-2 virus to infect the cells, while ACE2 acts as a gateway to enter the cells.<\/p>\n
The researchers also reviewed evidence from prior studies that carnosic acid has a separate effect in inhibiting a powerful inflammatory pathway that is active in severe COVID-19 as well as in other diseases including Alzheimer’s.<\/p>\n
“We think that carnosic acid, or some optimised derivative, is worth investigating as a potentially cheap, safe, and effective treatment for COVID-19 and some other inflammation-related disorders,” said study senior author Stuart Lipton, a professor at Scripps Research, US.<\/p>\n
Rosemary is an economically important plant species that is widely distributed due to its culinary, medicinal, and cosmetic uses.<\/p>\n
In a 2016 study, Lipton and colleagues showed that carnosic acid found in rosemary activates an anti-inflammatory, antioxidant signalling pathway called the Nrf2.<\/p>\n
They found evidence that this pathway reduces Alzheimer’s-like signs in mouse models of that disease, which is known to feature brain inflammation.<\/p>\n
For the new study, Lipton and colleagues from the Tokyo University of Technology, Japan, described their further studies of this anti-inflammatory effect on the immune cells that drive inflammation in COVID-19 and Alzheimer’s.<\/p>\n
The researchers proposed that this effect could be beneficial against the inflammation observed in COVID-19 and in some cases of the post-COVID syndrome known as long COVID.<\/p>\n
Long COVID is characterised by symptoms such as cognitive difficulties often described as “brain fog.”<\/p>\n
Using a standard infectivity assay, the researchers showed that carnosic acid can directly block SARS-CoV-2’s ability to infect cells, with progressively greater infection-blocking activity at higher doses.<\/p>\n
While the finding is preliminary, the researchers propose that carnosic acid has this antiviral effect, despite being a safe and relatively unreactive compound, because it is converted to its active form by the inflammation and oxidation found at sites of infection.<\/p>\n
In that active form, they suggest, the compound modifies the ACE2 receptor for SARS-CoV-2 — making the receptor impregnable to the virus and thereby blocking infection.<\/p>\n
“Carnosic acid represents a ‘pathologically activated therapeutic’ in preclinical models of disease — inactive and innocuous in its normal state, but converted to an active form where it needs to be active,” Lipton said.<\/p>\n
The researchers are working to synthesise and test more potent derivatives of carnosic acid with improved drug characteristics for potential use in inflammation-related disorders.<\/p>\n
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Washington, Feb 2 (PTI) A compound found in the medicinal and culinary herb rosemary may potentially block the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and prevent inflammation caused by COVID-19, a preliminary study suggests. The research, published in the journal Antioxidants, found that the compound, carnosic acid, can block the interaction between the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein and the receptor […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-183193","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183193","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=183193"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183193\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=183193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=183193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=183193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}