College of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Govt. Medical College, Kozhikode, Kerala, India.
Department of Pharmaceutics, Faculty of Pharmacy, King Abdulaziz University, Saudi Arabia.
Med Hypotheses. 2020 Oct;143:110081. doi: 10.1016/j.mehy.2020.110081. Epub 2020 Jul 7.
Hand hygiene by washing with soap and water is recommended for the prevention of COVID-19 spread. Soaps and detergents are explained to act by damaging viral spike glycoproteins (peplomers) or by washing out the virus through entrapment in the micelles. Technically, soaps come under a functional category of molecules known as surfactants. Surfactants are widely used in pharmaceutical formulations as excipients. We wonder why surfactants are still not tried for prophylaxis or therapy against COVID-19? That too when many of them have proven antiviral properties. Moreover, lung surfactants have already shown benefits in respiratory viral infections. Therefore, we postulate that surfactant-based prophylaxis and therapy would be promising. We believe that our hypothesis would stimulate debate or new research exploring the possibility of surfactant-based prophylaxis and therapy against COVID-19. The success of a surfactant-based technique would save the world from any such pandemic in the future too.
用肥皂和水洗手被推荐用于预防 COVID-19 的传播。肥皂和清洁剂的作用机制被解释为破坏病毒刺突糖蛋白（包膜），或者通过将病毒困在胶束中来冲洗掉病毒。从技术上讲，肥皂属于一类被称为表面活性剂的功能性分子。表面活性剂在药物制剂中被广泛用作赋形剂。我们想知道为什么表面活性剂还没有被尝试用于预防或治疗 COVID-19？即使其中许多已经被证明具有抗病毒特性。此外，肺表面活性剂已经在呼吸道病毒感染中显示出益处。因此，我们假设基于表面活性剂的预防和治疗将是有前途的。我们相信，我们的假设将引发辩论或新的研究，探索基于表面活性剂的预防和治疗 COVID-19 的可能性。这种基于表面活性剂的技术的成功也将使世界在未来免受任何此类大流行的影响。
