Use of electrical impedance to screen for new antiparasitic drugs
As current drug screening methods are hampered by low throughput and potential subjectivity in parasite-phenotype evaluation, electrical impedance platform and method to screen for drugs against parasites, such as Schistosoma mansoni, has been developed.
Schistosomiasis is an acute and chronic disease caused by tropical parasitic worms, which parasitize annually over 200 million people worldwide. Screening of antischistosomal compounds is hampered by the low throughput and potential subjectivity of the visual evaluation of the parasite phenotypes, which affects the current drug assays. Therefore, in collaboration with the group of J. Keiser at the Swiss Institute of Tropical Health in Basel, we developed an impedance‐based platform to assess the motility and viability of Schistosoma mansoni schistosomula upon exposure to drugs, including praziquantel, oxethazaine and mefloquine (P. S. Ravaynia, et al., "Parallelized impedance‐based platform for continuous dose‐response characterization of antischistosomal drugs", Advanced Biosystems 2020, Article 1900304). The automated and parallelized platform enables unbiased and continuous measurements of dose–response relationships for more than 48 h, which enabled to extract temporal characteristics of dose–response curves that are essential for selecting drugs that feature high activity and fast kinetics of action. Impedance‐based detection provides a wealth of information for in vitro characterization of candidate antischistosomals or antiparasitic drugs and represents a promising tool for the identification of new lead compounds.
An image of the paper also was selected for the backside cover of the journal.
external page Advanced Biosystems by Wiley is publishing research into technologies that enhance and harness biological systems, including systems and synthetic biology, advanced therapeutics, and biohybrids and neurotechnology.
