Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania are working to create a special chewing gum that could help reduce the spread of COVID-19 by “trapping” the virus so a person can’t transmit it to someone else.
Experts agree that vaccinations are the best way to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, but it’s also known that vaccinated people can still transmit the virus. The University of Pennsylvania researchers are hoping that their chewing gum will give people a low-cost way to further prevent COVID-19 from spreading.
“This gum offers an opportunity to neutralize the virus in the saliva, giving us a simple way to possibly cut down on a source of disease transmission,” Henry Daniell, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Dental Medicine and leader of the research, told Penn Today.
The gum contains plant-grown ACE2 proteins, which showed in laboratory studies to neutralize the SARS-CoV-2 virus. When researchers exposed saliva samples from COVID-19 patients to the modified chewing gum, they found the levels of viral RNA were “drastically reduced” to the point that the virus was almost undetectable, according to a study published in Molecular Today.
“Henry’s approach of making the proteins in plants and using them orally is inexpensive, hopefully scalable; it really is clever,” Ronald Collman, a virologist at Penn Medicine who is working on the research, told Penn Today.
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Reducing a viral load of the virus should limit the risk of transmission, according to the study, and may help reduce the severity of COVID-19.
The research is still in its early stages, and the researchers are working on getting permission to conduct a clinical trial in humans to determine if the gum is safe and effective. Should the gum work, Penn Today reported it could be used in situations where people need to be in close proximity to each other—such as a dental cleaning, for example—to reduce the risk of passing the virus to others.
“We are already using masks and other physical barriers to reduce the chance of transmission,” Daniell said. “This gum could be used as an additional tool in that fight.”
Although the current target is to provide the gum to people who test positive for COVID-19, Daniell told Newsweek that if it works, the gum could be used for everyday prevention. He said reducing the viral load in unvaccinated people could also help prevent them from being hospitalized for COVID-19 because symptoms are proportional to viral loads.
Before researchers can bring their chewing gum to market, they have to determine how much of it should be used per day, which will be based on how long it takes the virus to replicate. However, if it does prove to be an effective tool at combating coronavirus, Daniell told “hundreds of millions of chewing gum” could be produced within three months.
