A novel antiviral formulation inhibits a range of enveloped viruses.

Nicola F Fletcher; Luke W Meredith; Emma L Tidswell; Steven R Bryden; Daniel Gonçalves-Carneiro; Yasmin Chaudhry; Claire Shannon-Lowe; Michael A Folan; Daniella A Lefteri; Marieke Pingen; Dalan Bailey; Clive S McKimmie; Alan W Baird

The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is . https://doi. org/10.1101 org/10. /2020 To firstly show that ViroSAL can inactivate infectious SFV in vitro (Supplementary Figure 2) in addition to ZIKV (Figure 2) , SFV6 was incubated at increasing infectious titres with 5% ViroSAL at pH5.5 for 2 minutes. Following immediate restoration of physiological pH, solution was applied to monolayers of BHK-21 cells and infectious titre assessed by plaque assay. As a control SFV6 was incubated similarly at pH5.5 in the absence of ViroSAL. The amount of infectious SFV was reduced to beyond the limit of detection by ViroSAL, suggesting this virus is highly sensitive to treatment (Supplementary Figure 2) . Similarly, when ViroSAL treated SFV6 was inoculated subcutaneously into mice, the titre of virus at 24 hours post infection was significantly reduced (Supplementary Figure 2) . We next determined whether topical application of ViroSAL can also suppress virus infection when virus was inoculated subcutaneously into a mosquito bite. In this experiment, ViroSAL was applied immediate post mosquito bite and left for 20 minutes to allow penetration of skin by ViroSAL, or left untreated as a control. SFV was then inoculated subcutaneously into the mosquito bite as previously described (Pingen et al., 2016) . Re-application of ViroSAL to the inoculation site was repeated at 5 hours post infection. At 24 hours post infection, those mice receiving ViroSAL had a significantly reduced amount of virus RNA at the inoculation/bite site and limited dissemination of virus to the spleen 24 hours post infection ( Figure 6A ).