Are you eating a potential HIV treatment with your favorite meal?

Soy sauce may hold the key to treating HIV.

According to researchers from the University of Missouri School of Medicine, soy sauce contains a potent antiviral compound that may be able to combat difficult-to-kill viruses like the one responsible for AIDS. What’s the mysterious ingredient? It’s called EFdA (4′-ethynyl-2-fluoro-2′-deoxyadenosine) and was put in the Yamasa brand soy sauce as a flavor enhancer in 2001.

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At the time, EFdA was just a way to make soy sauce taste a little better, but researchers soon realized it was very similar in makeup to tenofovir, one of the anti-viral medications currently used to treat HIV. Unfortunately, Live Science reports that most patients on tenofovir develop a resistance to the drug, eventually requiring more potent medications to control HIV.

How could soy sauce’s EFdA treat HIV?

EFdA is a compound called a nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor (NRTI), which means it can interrupt the replication of HIV cells. Essentially, when the HIV cell goes to replicate itself, EFdA tricks it into creating an altered DNA strand that prevents replication.

NRTIs are called ‘chain terminators’ because they stop the copying of the DNA chain and, once incorporated, it’s like a dead end,” Stefan Sarafianos, a virologist at the University of Missouri’s Bond Life Sciences Center, said in Decoding Science.

And unlike tenofovir, EFdA isn’t broken down by the liver and kidneys as quickly and tends to be activated by the cells in a more timely manner.

“These two reasons make it more potent than other drugs, and so our task is to look at the structural features that make it such a fantastic drug,” Sarafianos said.

The research into this soy sauce compound is still on-going, and no clinical trials in humans have yet been undertaken. Monkeys, however, that were infected with simian HIV and then treated with EFdA showed a marked improvement within a month’s time, going from a state where researchers were contemplating humane euthanasia to bouncing in their cages full of energy.

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