Bioinformatics, Computational and Systems Biology - Poster Session E
Poster M2 - Probability of target attainment to assess efficacy of Clarithromycin, Ethambutol, and Rifampicin to treat nontuberculous mycobacterium (NTM) infections
Associate Professor Purdue University, United States
Introduction: NTMs are environmental bacteria that can grow around medical device implants, or in the blood. Since these bacteria are the same genus as Mycobacterium tuber- culosis (Mtb), antibiotics that are used to treat Mtb are also used to treat NTM infections. Our research shows how the assumption that antibiotics will work e↵ectively across species in a genus is not always a good methodology for disease treatment.
Materials and
Methods: Published pharmacokinetic (PK) models were recreated in MATLAB to solve for probability of target attainment (PTA), a measure of how efficacious drug is against a variety of strains in bacterial species. Models for Clarithromycin, Ethambutol, and Rifampicin are historical models, but they had not been designed to answer PTA of NTM infection.
Results, Conclusions, and Discussions: PTA graphs for Clarithromycin (CLR), Ethambutol (EMB), and Rifampicin (RIF) show why these drugs are used for Mtb infection, and why they should be reconsidered in their use to treat NTM infections. The PTA outputs show that there should be more work to study which antibiotics are the most effective at treating NTM infection. The overall impact of this work is to identify gaps in current NTM treatment approaches and inform development of optimal treatment strategies for NTM infections.
