ABSTRACT
Background: Concomitant treatment with antimalaria and antiretroviral drug is a new challenge in the management of malaria and HIV co-infection. Primaquine is a substrate and also an inhibitor of CYP3A4, while ritonavir is a substrate, an inhibitor, and also an inducer for CYP3A4. The objective of this study is to measure the CYP3A4 mRNA expression in HepG2 cell culture induced by primaquine and ritonavir co-treatment. Methods: For the initial study HepG2 cells were treated with 30, 40, 50 uM of primaquine; 2, 10, 20 uM ritonavir; DMSO ≤0.1 % for negative control; or 20 uM rifampicin for positive control. While for the co-treatment study the cells were treated with 40 uM primaquine+10 uM ritonavir; DMSO ≤0.1 %; or 20 uM rifampicin for 72 hours. The cells were harvested using trypsin–EDTA and total RNA was extracted using the Tripure isolation reagent. After determining the quantity of RNA spectrophotometrically, CYP3A4 mRNA expression was quantified using real-time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). Results: The expression of CYP3A4 mRNA was up-regulated (1.22 fold over control) in HepG2 cells co-treated with primaquine and ritonavir. These data suggest that the induction effect of ritonavir was more dominant than the inhibitory effect of primaquine. Conclusion: Concomitant administration of primaquine and ritonavir result in up-regulation of CYP3A4 mRNA expression in vitro.
Subject(s)
Cell Culture Techniques , Primaquine , RitonavirABSTRACT
Aim To develop a simple spot method to attach cultured cells in suspension on to a glass slide. Methods We compared three approaches using both conventional and special glass slide (Shandon-Polysin)., either without additional fetal bovine serum (FBS), or with addition of 3 or 10 μl of FBS to a 20 μl sample (altogether there were six approaches). The slides were examined qualitatively for the background color, boundary color and intactness, and whether there were folded and detached parts. Further, for each slide, the attached intact cells were counted, and the percentage of attached intact cells per number of spotted cells was calculated. The difference in attach intact cells between different approaches was analyzed by ANOVA using SPSS 13.0 for windows. Results There were no significant difference in the percentage of attached intact cells between the six approaches (P= 0.804), though the approach using special glass slide without additional FBS (FBS final concentration 5%) yield the highest percentage of attached intact cells, showed clean background without folded parts. Conclusions We have developed a simple spot method for cultured cell suspension, and the best approach to make spot specimen is using special glass slide with 5% FBS in the cell suspension.