"Why The Next Flu Medicine Could Come From Frog Mucus"

"What’s more amazing than kissing a frog and getting a handsome prince? How about scraping off a bit of the mucus layer that covers his skin and finding in it a potent weapon against influenza?

That, quite simply, is what scientists from Emory University appear to have done in discovering an antimicrobial peptide on the skin of Hydrophylax bahuvistara, a species of frog native to southern India. What they found could treat a relentless scourge of humankind that kills as many as half a million people around the world each year.

There, in the film of secretions that protects the frog’s skin from deadly pathogens, scientists have identified a string of amino acids that completely destroys a wide swath of influenza A viruses while doing no harm to healthy human red blood cells."

Melissa Healy reports for the Los Angeles Times April 18, 2017.