A novel in vitro co-culture system allows the concurrent analysis of mature biofilm and planktonic bacteria with human lung epithelia

A roadmap to pulmonary delivery strategies for the treatment of infectious lung diseases

Pulmonary drug delivery is a highly attractive topic for the treatment of infectious lung diseases. Drug delivery via the pulmonary route offers unique advantages of no first-pass effect and high bioavailability, which provides an important means to deliver therapeutics directly to lung lesions. Starting from the structural characteristics of the lungs and the biological barriers for achieving efficient delivery, we aim to review literatures in the past decade regarding the pulmonary delivery strategies used to treat infectious lung diseases. Hopefully, this review article offers new insights into the future development of therapeutic strategies against pulmonary infectious diseases from a delivery point of view.

Disease Models: Lung Models for Testing Drugs Against Inflammation and Infection

Lung diseases have increasingly attracted interest in the past years. The all-known fear of failing treatments against severe pulmonary infections and plans of the pharmaceutical industry to limit research on anti-infectives to a minimum due to cost reasons makes infections of the lung nowadays a "hot topic." Inhalable antibiotics show promising efficacy while limiting adverse systemic effects to a minimum. Moreover, in times of increased life expectancy in developed countries, the treatment of chronic maladies implicating inflammatory diseases, like bronchial asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, becomes more and more exigent and still lacks proper treatment.In this chapter, we address in vitro models as well as necessary in vivo models to help develop new drugs for the treatment of various severe pulmonary diseases with a strong focus on infectious diseases. By first presenting the essential hands-on techniques for the setup of in vitro models, we intend to combine these with already successful and interesting model approaches to serve as some guideline for the development of future models. The overall goal is to maximize time and cost-efficacy and to minimize attrition as well as animal trials when developing novel anti-infective therapeutics.

Interaction between bovine mammary epithelial cells and planktonic or biofilm Staphylococcus aureus: The bacterial lifestyle determines its internalization ability and the pathogen recognition

The main cause of mastitis, one of the most costly diseases in the dairy industry, is bacterial intramammary infection. Many of these bacteria are biofilm formers. Biofilms have been associated with resistance to antibiotics and to the host immune system. Here, we evaluated different experimental models representing bacterial biofilm lifestyle with the aim to study bacterial invasion into bovine mammary epithelial cells and the interaction of these cells with planktonic or biofilm Staphylococcus aureus. Staphylococcus aureus V329, its nonbiofilm-forming mutant and bovine mammary alveolar cells (MAC-T) were used. Bacterial invasion was studied using the gentamicin exclusion test, cell viability by trypan blue exclusion technique, TLR2 expression by flow cytometry, IL1β/IL6 production by ELISA and IL8/TNFα gene expression by real-time polymerase chain reaction. Biofilm and planktonic S. aureus showed differences in their invasion ability, with the biofilm mode showing a lower ability. Planktonic S. aureus reduced MAC-T viability after 6 h of co-culture, while biofilms did so at 24 h. MAC-T infected with planktonic bacteria showed increased TLR2 expression. Both lifestyles increased IL8 expression and IL1β/IL6 production but did not modify TNFα expression. Our results demonstrate that the bacterial lifestyle affects the invasion behavior, suggesting that biofilms reduce the bacteria-epithelial cell interaction. Planktonic cultures seem to induce higher cellular activation than biofilms. Further knowledge about the complex host-biofilm interaction is necessary to design more efficient therapies against bovine mastitis.

Rapid Identification of Biofilms Using a Robust Multichannel Polymer Sensor Array

Infections caused by bacterial biofilms are challenging to diagnose because of the complexity of both the bacteria and the heterogeneous biofilm matrix. We report here a robust polymer-based sensor array that uses selective interactions between polymer sensor elements and the biofilm matrix to identify bacteria species. In this array, an appropriate choice of fluorophore enabled excimer formation and interpolymer FRET, generating six output channels from three polymers. Selective multivalent interactions of these polymers with the biofilm matrices caused differential changes in fluorescent patterns, providing a species-based signature of the biofilm. The real-world potential of the platform was further validated through identification of mixed-species bacterial biofilms and discrimination of biofilms in a mammalian cell-biofilm co-culture wound model.

Effects of bacterial physiological states and bacterial species on host-microbe interactions

This study investigated how the physiological states of Aggregatibacter actinomycetemcomitans (Aa) and Streptococcus mitis affect their intracellular invasion capabilities and the resulting host cell responses. The physiological states included two forms of planktonic states, floating or sedimented (by centrifugation) and the biofilm state (with centrifugation). Confluent epithelial Ca9-22 cells were challenged with floating or sedimented planktonic cultures, or with 24-h biofilms for 3 h. The results show that intracellular invasion efficiencies were clearly affected by the bacterial physiological states. For both bacterial species, the sedimented-cells displayed 2-10 times higher invasion efficiency than the floating-cells (p < 0.05). The invasion efficiency of Aa biofilms was three fold lower than sedimented cells, whereas those of S. mitis biofilms were similar to sedimented cells. Unlike invasion, the metabolic activities of Ca9-22 were unaffected by different bacterial physiological states. However, Aa biofilms induced higher IL-1β expression than planktonic cultures. In conclusion, different bacterial physiological states can affect the outcomes of (in vitro) host-microbe interaction in different ways.