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Disposable Dosators for Pulmonary Insufflation of Therapeutic Agents to Small Animals

Development of new therapeutic products requires efficacy testing in an animal model. The pulmonary route of administration can be utilized to deliver ...

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

The tendency for mycobacteria to aggregate poses a challenge for their use in microplate based assays. Good dispersions have been difficult to achieve in high-throughput screening (HTS) assays used in the search for novel antibacterial drugs to treat tuberculosis and other related diseases. Here we describe a method using filtration to overcome the problem of variability resulting from aggregation of mycobacteria. This method consistently yielded higher reproducibility and lower variability than conventional methods, such as settling under gravity and vortexing.

Filtration improves the performance of a high-throughput screen for anti-mycobacterial compounds.

Analog development of existing drugs and direct drug delivery to the lungs by inhalation as treatments for multiple and extensively drug resistant (MDR and XDR) tuberculosis (TB) represent new therapeutic strategies. Pyrazinamide (PZA) is critical to drug sensitive TB therapy and is included in regimens for MDR TB. However, PZA-resistant Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) strains threaten its use. Pyrazinoic acid esters (PAEs) are PZA analogs effective against Mtb in vitro, including against the most common PZA resistant strains. However, PAEs require testing for TB efficacy in animal models.

Miriam S. Braunstein

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Disposable Dosators for Pulmonary Insufflation of Therapeutic Agents to Small Animals