I-Corps: Commercialization Evaluation of a Antibiotic Delivery System for Tb

Valdosta State University, Valdosta GA

Investigators

Abstract

Tuberculosis is an infectious disease that has infected approximately one third of the planet's human population. The current pharmaceutical regiment used to treat the disease is a series of front line antibiotics. The microbe responsible for this malady, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, is building up a resistance to these drugs. These drug resistance strains of bacterium are emerging around the world. The pharmaceutical industry can produce the front line drugs economically on a large scale, so having to develop new drugs and new production methods would prove costly and likely result in an immunity situation again. Rather than attempting to discover new antibiotics, the proposed technology is focused on not only delivering known antibiotics to the bacterium more efficiently, but also hiding the drug from being recognized by the body's immune system. The proposed technology is focused on drug delivery associated with antibiotics for tuberculosis. Over the past forty years little work has been done in terms of developing new antibiotics. This team?s approach uses between one and three components that accelerates some biological action, such as the cells metabolism or a proteins task. As the activity of the cell increases, the team's theorem is that the antibiotic can go undetected by the body's immune system and have a more efficient uptake once its normal physiological processes are accelerated. Most drugs, such as antibiotics or cancer drugs have a mechanism of action that serve a singular mission, to stop some part of the cell from functioning. This research team has developed a delivery system for first and second line antibiotics used in the treatment of tuberculosis. It has been demonstrated to improve the efficacy of antibiotics such as capreomycin, amikacin, isoniazid and rifampici1-4.