Vaginal Tritrichomonas foetus infection in mice as an in vivo model for drug development against Trichomonas vaginalis.

Autor: Nieskens NM; Department of Medicine, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, California, United States of America., Miyamoto Y; Department of Medicine, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, California, United States of America., Hurysz BM; Center for Discovery and Innovation in Parasitic Diseases, Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, California, United States of America., O'Donoghue AJ; Center for Discovery and Innovation in Parasitic Diseases, Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, California, United States of America., Eckmann L; Department of Medicine, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, California, United States of America.
Jazyk: angličtina
Zdroj: PloS one [PLoS One] 2024 Oct 01; Vol. 19 (10), pp. e0308672. Date of Electronic Publication: 2024 Oct 01 (Print Publication: 2024).
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0308672
Abstrakt: Trichomonas vaginalis is the causative agent of the common sexually transmitted disease, trichomoniasis, which affects more than a hundred million people worldwide. Metronidazole and tinidazole, agents belonging to the 5-nitroheterocyclic class of antimicrobials, are most often used to treat infection, but increased resistance has been reported and adverse effects of these drugs can be significant. Consequently, an urgent need exists for the development of novel drug entities against trichomoniasis. Critical for antimicrobial drug development is the demonstration of in vivo efficacy. Murine models of vaginal T. vaginalis infection are unreliable for unknown reasons. Meanwhile, murine infections with the related bovine pathogen, Tritrichomonas foetus, tend to be more robust, although susceptibility to different antimicrobials might differ from T. vaginalis. Here, we explored the utility of T. foetus infection as a surrogate model for drug development against T. vaginalis. Four different T. foetus strains caused robust vaginal infection in young mice, while none of four diverse T. vaginalis strains did. Comparison of drug susceptibility profiles revealed that T. foetus and T. vaginalis were similarly susceptible to a range of 5-nitroheterocyclic and gold(I) compounds. By comparison, proteasome inhibitors were 10- to 15-fold less active against T. foetus than T. vaginalis, although one of the proteasome inhibitors, bortezomib, had low micromolar activity or better against multiple strains of both trichomonads. Different strains of T. foetus were used to demonstrate the utility of the murine vaginal infection models for in vivo efficacy testing, including for bortezomib and a gold(I) compound. The differences in susceptibility to proteasome inhibitors may be partially explained by differences in the proteasome subunit sequences between the two trichomonads, although the functional relevance of the proteasome was similar in both organisms. These findings indicate that T. foetus can serve as a reliable surrogate model for T. vaginalis in vitro and in murine infections in vivo, but caution must be exercised for specific drug classes with targets, such as the proteasome, that may display genetic divergence between the trichomonads.
Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
(Copyright: © 2024 Nieskens et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)
Databáze: MEDLINE
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