Autoluminescent Mycobacterium tuberculosis for rapid, real-time, non-invasive assessment of drug and vaccine efficacy.

ABSTRACT: Preclinical efforts to discover and develop new drugs and vaccines for tuberculosis are hampered by the reliance on colony-forming unit (CFU) counts as primary outcomes for in vivo efficacy studies and the slow growth of Mycobacterium tuberculosis. The utility of bioluminescent M. tuberculosis reporter strains for real-time in vitro and ex vivo assessment of drug and vaccine activity has been demonstrated but a simple, non-invasive, real-time surrogate marker to replace CFU counts for real-time evaluation of drug and vaccine efficacy in vivo has not been described. We describe the development of a fully virulent and stable autoluminescent strain of M. tuberculosis and proof-of-concept experiments demonstrating its utility for in vivo bioluminescence imaging to assess the efficacy of new dr

SUBMITTER: Zhang T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3256174 | biostudies-literature | 2012

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature