Distinctive structure of viruses and their complicated life cycle have made the discovery of definite treatments against antiviral infections extremely demanding. Therefore, the scientific society has to be ready to respond with adequately and sufficient tools and knowledge. These include efforts to strengthen disease-specific systems and capacities, including pharmaceuticals and other public health non-drug interventions. The world has bet most of its research funding on finding a vaccine and effective drugs. That effort is vital, but it must be accompanied by research on how to target and improve the non-drug interventions that are the only available tools that can be used to protect us against pandemics, while we wait again for new vaccine or drug (Holmes et al., 2017).
As we are still unable to predict with every confidence the progress of coronavirus pandemic and considering that the next pandemic is most likely to be caused by influenza, the discovery of antiviral compounds continues to be the priority public health threat in the world (Mani et al., 2020; Martinez et al., 2020). Most important, we need to have a range of available antiviral tools that can be responding rapidly and effectively to emergencies. For practical application, non-drug antiviral compounds must be available in massive amounts, and must be produced cost-effectively. These requirements might eliminate recombinant proteins from consideration as the time and costs of production in cell-based fermentation systems are prohibitively high (Mani et al., 2020; Martinez et al., 2020). The main objective of the AlgaeNet4AV project is the characterization, and exploitation of microalgae biodiversity as a source for bio-based cosmetics with antiviral potential towards influenza and coronavirus pandemic strains (de Andrade et al., 2022; Zaharieva et al., 2022). These products aims to be used as non-drug interventions for eliminating the propagation of harmful viruses and directly contribute to reduce the risk and speed of transmission, acting as first-line weapons towards pandemic outbreaks.
Microalgae are very diverse, and adapted to a broad variety of environmental conditions, the chances to find novel and unexplored bioactive metabolites with properties of interest for biotechnological and biomedical applications are high (Camacho et al., 2019; Fabris et al., 2020; Pagarete et al., 2021). The potential of exploiting the microalgae-based ingredients with antiviral properties has already documented (Falaise et al., 2016; Carbone et al 2021; Romero et al., 2021), however due to the lack of systematic R&D efforts, these compounds are totally unexploited. Lectins and polyphenols from microalgae are compounds that display strong antiviral activities, that haven’t been exploited so far. Lectins are ubiquitous proteins/glycoproteins of non-immune origin that bind reversibly to carbohydrates in non-covalent and highly specific manner. These lectin-glycan interactions could be exploited for establishment of novel therapeutics, targeting the adherence stage of viruses and thus helpful in eliminating wide spread viral infections (Singh et al., 2018; Lee et al., 2019; Carbone et al 2021; Romero et al., 2021). They have a unique and rapid mode-of-action holding several advantages compared to conventional drugs. For example, their ability to bind viral surface sugars in seconds, makes them much faster than the existing drugs. Lectins resistance has not been observed among virus from diverse sources and resistant strains can generally not be selected during in vitro experiments.