Researchers identify gut bacterium that inhibits SARS-CoV-2
Researchers from South Korea screened common gut bacteria for activity against SARS-CoV-2 and found a bacterium that produces compounds that inhibit the coronavirus, according to new findings presented at the virtual World Microbe Forum.
“One of the interesting clinical findings is that some of the COVID-19 patients showed gastrointestinal symptoms, while others displayed stranded infection solely in the lung. If the bacteria that peacefully reside in our body without causing infection — called commensal microbes — might help in fighting the virus is still an open question to explore,” Mohammed Ali, a PhD student in medicine at Yonsei University in Seoul, told Healio.
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“In our work we found one bacterium, called Bifidobacterium, in which we observed such activity, and further experimental tests are going on,” Ali said. “Additionally, in the clinic, further research is also required to examine if fecal transplantation is helpful for such a patient.”
Ali and colleagues screened a total of 15 intestinal commensal bacteria for SARS-CoV-2 inhibiting abilities and found that Bifidobacterium — which can suppress other bacteria, including Heliobacter pylori — showed the strongest ability to suppress SARS-CoV-2 activity.
“Several studies used computational approaches to search for novel COVID-19 treatments,” Ali said. “In our work, we tried to use such a method to find disease inhibitors from microbial resources. However, like most of the studies in artificial intelligence, we faced a challenge to find clean training data for our model, something that we are working on right now to get a better model prediction with a goal to find more drugs to fight the COVID-19 pandemic.”
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Ali M, et al. Identification of microbe driven therapeutic agents that inhibit SARS-CoV-2. Presented at World Microbe Forum; June 20-24, 2021 (virtual meeting).
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