A recent study claims that chewing gum could reduce the spread of the virus that causes COVID-19.
The findings in the fight against COVID-19 have been called fresh hope by the headlines. How excited should we be? Would this gum work against omicron?
People with high levels of virus in their saliva have been exposed to the disease. Researchers in the US wanted to investigate if a specially designed chewing gum could reduce the amount of virus in the mouth.
It is not a new idea to chew gum. Studies have shown that chewing gum with certain substances can improve oral health, reduce the incidence of dental ailments and cut the number of harmfulbacteria.
Targeting a virus in this way is a novel approach.
The entry into human cells is accomplished by attaching the SARS-CoV-2 to theACE2 proteins.
The idea was to make a gum with high levels of ACE2 that could "trap" virus particles in the mouth, so they wouldn't spread to other people.
The researchers mixed saliva samples from patients with COVID-19 with a powdered form of gum to test the effectiveness of chewing gum. The treated saliva had a significant reduction in the number of particles of the virus compared to the placebo saliva.
The gum prevented the pseudotyped virus from infecting cells in the lab. The gum had a correlation with the amount of gum used to reduce the amount of viral entry into cells.
This suggests that the ACE2 gum makes it hard for the spike protein to get into cells.
There are reasons for caution.
There are a number of reasons we can't see this gum as a game-changing invention. The experiments were conducted in a controlled environment rather than with real people.
The conditions in a lab experiment will be different than those in a person's mouth. There are other questions that we don't yet have answers to, such as whether the motion of chewing doesn't affect the integrity of the ACE2 in the gum.
Would the environment in a person's mouth affect the effectiveness of gum? How long would one piece of gum last? If the research progresses to this stage, it will be interesting to see if the gum produces the same effects in people as it has in the lab.
The researchers didn't use the full SARS-CoV-2 virus in their experiments because the gum significantly reduced infections.
It would be interesting to see how the gum affects the full outbreak of the disease.
The principles of virology give us reason to be optimistic about the effectiveness of the gum.
The gum works by getting into human cells by attaching to aACE2 proteins. We won't know the answer to this question until the product is tested in real-world trials.
Understanding what this gum is designed for is important. The main use is likely to be to reduce the spread of the COVID-19 in clinical settings.
It's not clear how well it would work as a prophylactic to prevent people from getting the virus, especially when it can be transmitted through multiple routes, such as the eyes and nose.
This gum could have exciting prospects in a clinical setting, for example reducing spread in dental surgeries or COVID hospital wards. It could be used in combination with other methods to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
We need more research before we can chew it.
Grace C Roberts is a research fellow at the University of Leeds.
The Conversation's article is a Creative Commons licensed one. The original article can be found here.
