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Submitted on 7 May 2018
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Double paradigm shift for the antibiotics’ activity on
viruses: Zika’s lesson
Didier Raoult
To cite this version:
Didier Raoult. Double paradigm shift for the antibiotics’ activity on viruses: Zika’s lesson.
Proceed-ings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America , National Academy of
Sciences, 2017, 114 (7), pp.E1045. �10.1073/pnas.1620247114�. �hal-01496187�
LETTER
Double paradigm shift for the antibiotics
’activityon
viruses: Zika
’s lesson
Didier Raoulta,1
The PNAS paper by Retallack et al. on the activity of azithromycin on Zika is critical (1). The activity of anti-biotics was initially determined on bacteria. Natural antibiotics all have nonribosomal peptides (2) using atypical amino acids and their structural motifs are extremely archaic (3). Furthermore, their role, in addi-tion to antibacterial activity, is usually wider. Thus, Ivermectin (awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize of medi-cine) has an activity against viruses (including Zika), bacteria, and eukaryotes (4, 5). According to the prin-ciple of parsimony, it is likely that many of these pep-tides, preserved for billions of years, have a wide activity, which is thus not restricted to a bacterial group. In this sense, reevaluating them as antiviral drugs can create interesting surprises, such as the ac-tivity of Teicoplanin on the Ebola virus (4). This is a first paradigm shift; the weapons developed by bacteria and fungi to fight against their enemies can be used
against eukaryotes, bacteria, archae, and viruses, even though their first activity was only against one micro-bial group. The second paradigm shift is the brutally empirical strategy that has been developed in recent years to accelerate the process of using molecules and to randomly test our entire medicinal heritage— already Food and Drug Administration validated—to detect molecules that would be active by chance (5). This is the triumph of the technology-driven strategy against the hypothesis-driven strategy, which gives Retallack et al. (1) spectacular results. Concerning Zika, this shift is the proof that the empirical hypotheses testing all of the molecules (whose safety, especially in pregnant women, is established) can make it possi-ble to find a drug that is immediately effective against Zika, and that it is necessary to abandon the dichot-omy between bacteria and viruses or bacteria and eu-karyotes in antibiotic activities.
1 Retallack H, et al. (2016) Zika virus cell tropism in the developing human brain and inhibition by azithromycin. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 113(50):14408–14413.
2 Angelakis E, Merhej V, Raoult D (2013) Related actions of probiotics and antibiotics on gut microbiota and weight modification. Lancet Infect Dis 13(10):889–899.
3 Caetano RA (2016) Spin-current and spin-splitting in helicoidal molecules due to spin-orbit coupling. Sci Rep 6:23452. 4 Colson P, Raoult D (2016) Fighting viruses with antibiotics: An overlooked path. Int J Antimicrob Agents 48(4):349–352. 5 Barrows NJ, et al. (2016) A screen of FDA-approved drugs for inhibitors of Zika virus infection. Cell Host Microbe 20(2):259–270.
a
Unit ´e de Recherche sur les Maladies Infectieuses et Tropicales Emergentes, Aix Marseille Universit ´e, INSERM 1095, CNRS07278, IRD198, 13005 Marseille, France
Author contributions: D.R. wrote the paper. The author declares no conflict of interest.
1Email: didier.raoult@gmail.com.
www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1620247114 PNAS | February 14, 2017 | vol. 114 | no. 7 | E1045
LETT
