Antiviral gum

In this Friday Issue of Penn Today, we invite you to return to a piece we ran in March to read about the innovative approach that Henry Daniell of the School of Dental Medicine takes to creating low-cost solutions to a common medical issue. One of them is chewing gum.

In a study published earlier this year, Daniell and his colleagues focused on reducing the transmission of the viruses responsible for seasonal influenza and herpes simplex (HSV), as they represent a substantial global health burden and cause economic losses worldwide.

The problem of low influenza vaccination rates and a lack of an HSV vaccine underscores the need for a new approach that targets reducing viral loads where transmission occurs. In this case, that means the mouth.

Building on previous work, Daniell and his colleagues turned to chewing gum, testing the ability of a gum made from lablab beans — which naturally contain an antiviral trap protein -to neutralize two herpes simplex viruses and two influenza A strains.

Importantly, the researchers prepared the gum to comply with the FDA specifications for drug products and found it to be safe. Daniell notes,

"These observations augur well for evaluating bean gum in human clinical studies to minimize virus infection/transmission."