Researchers from the Department of Ophthalmology, Visual and Anatomical Sciences at the Wayne State University School of Medicine have identified three non-antibiotic drugs that can protect the eye from severe inflammation during bacterial infection.
How does one "repurpose" a drug, exactly?
Basically, you take a drug that has already been approved for one indication and identify additional uses for it.
In their search for alternative therapeutics to treat ocular infections, the researchers used high-throughput techniques of transcriptomics to understand the genome-level alterations involved in the host response during bacterial endophthalmitis, and adopted an innovative systems biology approach to identify key molecules and pathways associated with Staphylococcus aureus endophthalmitis.
The team predicted the three drugs that reversed gene signatures of bacterial endophthalmitis in an animal model’s retina: dequalinium chloride, clofilium tosylate, and glybenclamide, tested the efficacy of the drugs, and revealed that all three exhibited antiinflammatory properties against both antibiotic-sensitive and antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains in human cultured retinal cells.
The take home.
Intravitreal injections of all three drugs reduced intraocular inflammation in even methicillin-resistant S. aureus-infected mouse eyes, but dequalinium chloride and clofilium tosylate were also able to reduce bacterial burden.
Additionally, drug treatments improved visual function and protected the eye from retinal cell death, according to Susmita Das, PhD, lead author on the article published in iScience. (via)