Published ahead of print on September 3, 2009, doi:10.1164/rccm.200905-0795OC Am. J. Respir. Crit. Care Med., Volume 180, Number 11, December 2009, 1151-1157 A more recent version of this article appeared on December 1, 2009
Submitted on May 27, 2009 Short-course Therapy with Daily Rifapentine in a Murine Model of Latent Tuberculosis InfectionTianyu Zhang1,1 Center for Tuberculosis Research, Department of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland, United States, 2 Center for Tuberculosis Research, Department of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland, United States; Department of International Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, Maryland, United States * To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: enuermb{at}jhmi.edu.
Rationale: Regimens recommended to treat latent tuberculosis infection (LTBI) are 3-9 months long. A 2-month rifampin+pyrazinamide regimen is no longer recommended. Shorter regimens are highly desirable. Because substituting rifapentine for rifampin in the standard regimen for active tuberculosis halves the treatment duration needed to prevent relapse in mice, we hypothesized daily rifapentine-based regimens could shorten LTBI treatment to 2 months or less. Objectives and Methods: To improve an existing model of LTBI chemotherapy, mice were immunized with a more immunogenic recombinant BCG strain (rBCG30) and received very low-dose aerosol infection with Mycobacterium tuberculosis to establish a stable lung bacterial burden below 104 CFU without drug treatment. Mice received a control (isoniazid alone, rifampin alone, rifampin+isoniazid, rifampin+pyrazinamide) or test (rifapentine alone, rifapentine+isoniazid, rifapentine+pyrazinamide, rifapentine+isoniazid+pyrazinamide) regimen for 8 weeks. Rifamycin doses were 10 mg/kg/d, analogous to the same human doses. Outcomes were bi-weekly lung CFU counts and relapse after 4-8 weeks of treatment. Measurements and Main Results: M. tuberculosis CFU counts remained stable around 3.65 log10 in immunized, untreated mice. Isoniazid or rifampin left all or most mice culture-positive at week 8. Rifampin+isoniazid cured 0% and 53% of mice and rifampin+pyrazinamide cured 47% and 100% of mice in 4 and 8 weeks, respectively. Rifapentine-based regimens were more active than rifampin+isoniazid and indistinguishable from rifampin+pyrazinamide. Conclusions: In this improved murine model of LTBI chemotherapy with very low lung burden, existing regimens were well represented. Daily rifapentine-based regimens were at least as active as rifampin+pyrazinamide, suggesting they could effectively treat LTBI in 6-8 weeks. Key words: BCG mouse isoniazid rifampin pyrazinamide
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