Tamarind can protect against chikungunya, find IIT researchers

NEWDELHI: A protein derived from tamarind seed can protect against chikungunya, a mosquito-borne disease caused by the CHIKV alphavirus, according to researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee. The study has been accepted in the scientific journal, Virology.

Chikungunya causes fever, headache, and prolonged joint pains that can last for months after the infection has cleared.

The infection occurs mostly in the Indian subcontinent, Asia and Africa, with a major outbreak in 2015 affecting several countries in the Region of the Americas, according to the World Health Organisation.

In India, the disease affected over 12,500 people in 2017. To date, no therapy exists for the disease and treatment is usually symptomatic. The researchers first looked at whether the lectin protein isolated from the tamarind seed could bind with N-acetylglucosamine (NAG), a glucose molecule that forms the outer shell of alphaviruses like chikungunya, ross river virus and semliki virus.

“To cause infection, the NAG on the surface of the shell of the chikungunya virus binds with receptors on the host cells. The idea was that if the lectin protein bound with the NAG instead, the virus would not be able to infiltrate the host cell. We found that it could bind,” said Dr Shailly Tomar, assistant professor of biotechnology at IIT Roorkee and one of the authors of the paper.

“We found that the infectivity of the chikungunya virus coated with lectin (compared to normal chikungunya virus) reduced by 64%...This goes on to show that the lectin protein from the tamarind seed, if had as a medicine, is likely to reduce the severity of chikungunya disease,” said Tomar. The next step will be to observe whether the protein is able to protect against the infection in animal trials.

“When we provide the lectin protein as a pill...once in the blood, the protein should be able to prevent the spread of the virus from one cell to the other.”