Favipiravir Suppresses Zika Virus (ZIKV) through Activity as a Mutagen.

ABSTRACT: In a companion paper, we demonstrated that the nucleoside analogue favipiravir (FAV) suppressed Zika virus (ZIKV) replication in three human-derived cell lines-HeLa, SK-N-MC, and HUH-7. Our results revealed that FAV's effect was most pronounced in HeLa cells. In this work, we aimed to explain variation in FAV activity, investigating its mechanism of action and characterizing host cell factors relevant to tissue-specific differences in drug effect. Using viral genome sequencing, we show that FAV therapy was associated with an increase in the number of mutations and promoted the production of defective viral particles in all three cell lines. Our findings demonstrate that defective viral particles made up a larger portion of the viral population released from HeLa cells both at increasing FA

SUBMITTER: Franco EJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10224157 | biostudies-literature | 2023 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature