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Fruit Fly as a Model Organism for Blood-Brain Barrier Penetration and Infectious Disease in the Nanomedical Niche

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Abstract

Drosophila melanogaster, a.k.a. the common fruit fly, is a simple organism that may give a rapid, high-throughput response in regard to the therapeutic efficacy of nanoparticles and drugs, while circumventing the high environmental and monetary cost of today’s typical in vivo assays involving more complex animals, along with the immeasurable suffering imposed onto them. Here we give the progress report on our effort to turn D. melanogaster into a model organism for the in vivo testing of Blood-Brain Barrier (BBB) penetration of nano-particles and the treatment of infectious disease. We show that orally ingested superparamagnetic nanoparticles successfully cross the BBB in D. melanogaster and localize to the optic lobes of the third instar larval brain, while causing no adverse effects to the invertebrate organisms. We also show that both orally ingested calcium phosphate nanoparticles and biofilm-forming P. aeruginosa localize to the Drosophila crop, the food storage organ of the fly, which shrinks in response to infection. The model does not induce mortality consequential to infection and the effects of the internalization and proliferation of the microbes are evaluable by measuring the crop parameters, including fluorescence intensity and size. Continued development of these two models could simplify the preclinical testing of medical treatments and of pharmaceutical agents for neurological and infectious disease, while ensuring robust and reliable levels of statistical significance at low cost.

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Acknowledgment

The authors thank Shreya Ghosh from the Uskoković Lab at University of Illinois and Sean Tang from the Uskoković Lab at Chapman University for assistance with the fruit fly analyses and acknowledge the intramural University of Illinois at Chicago funds and the National Institute of Health grant R00-DE021416 for support. There are no conflicts of interest to declare.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. MP Biomedicals, 9 Goddard, Irvine, CA, 92618, USA

    Victoria Meng-Ting Wu

  2. Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of California, Engineering Gateway 4200, Irvine, CA, 92697, USA

    Vuk Uskoković

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  1. Victoria Meng-Ting Wu
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Correspondence to Vuk Uskoković.

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Wu, V.MT., Uskoković, V. Fruit Fly as a Model Organism for Blood-Brain Barrier Penetration and Infectious Disease in the Nanomedical Niche. J Bionic Eng 17, 553–569 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42235-020-0044-1

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