Inhaled and intrapulmonary therapies tend to fail for reasons that have little to do with potency. A molecule that binds its target tightly can still miss if it never reaches the distal airway or is cleared before it can act. Respiratory programs turn on two questions: how the drug gets in, and which model shows whether it worked.
Prisys Biotechnologies works on both. The Respirology platform combines NHP disease models, airway-specific dosing routes, and the imaging and sampling needed to see where a compound deposits.
(Nonhuman Primate (NHP) Biosafety Platform with integrated Respiratory Laboratories)
Therapeutic Area Expertise
Respiratory disorders differ in mechanism: reversible airway obstruction and inflammation in asthma, progressive airflow limitation in COPD, unresolving collagen deposition in fibrosis. What they share is a target tissue that is hard to dose evenly and hard to sample.
Species choice matters. A monkey lung is closer to a human lung in size, branching and aerosol deposition pattern than a rodent lung, which changes both the deposited fraction and the functional readouts.
Translatable Drug Delivery Technologies
Each route answers a different problem:
- Inhalation: Aerosol delivery to the airways and lungs without an invasive procedure, for targets in the bronchial tree or the alveolar region.
- Intrabronchial: Direct instillation into a selected bronchus, which concentrates the dose at one site and limits systemic exposure.
- Endotracheal: Direct administration into the trachea, used when the airway has to be secured, in emergency or intensive care settings.
The route decides the formulation, droplet size and sampling schedule. A suspension that nebulizes well may not pass an endotracheal tube.
Core Equipment: Aerogen Atomization System
The Aerogen atomization system is the center of the setup. A nebulizer turns a liquid formulation into an aerosol the animal inhales, and output rate and droplet size decide how much of the dose reaches the lower airway rather than the upper airway and the circuit. Running the same device across a study keeps the delivered dose comparable between animals and time points, which is what makes a dose-response curve readable.
Diverse Disease Models
Our portfolio includes a range of NHP disease models:
- Asthma: Induced by house dust mite, simulating human asthma with aerosol treatment and human clinical endpoints; or induced by ovalbumin, a model that mimics human asthma and is comparable to small animal models.
(PC50 test with acetylcholine (ACh) in Asthma Model)
- Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD): Our cigarette smoke-induced model mirrors the most common cause of COPD in humans, which allows a candidate to be tested against the exposure that produces the disease rather than against a single inflammatory trigger.
(CT-scan for fibrosis in IPF Model)
- Acute Lung inflammation: LPS induction produces a reproducible neutrophilic inflammatory response, which suits short studies of acute injury. Chemical induction with diluted hydrochloric acid produces an acute lung inflammation that mimics aspiration pneumonia.
- Lung Fibrosis: Our model replicates chronic and progressive fibrotic interstitial pneumonia, allowing in-depth investigation of a condition that develops slowly.
The Atopic dermatitis model shares the type 2 readouts used in the asthma work.
What These Models Let A Sponsor Decide
A respiratory program needs three answers before an IND-enabling package: does the candidate reach the target tissue, is the effect dose related, and is it worth the exposure.
The readouts match the question. Lung function covers resistance, compliance and PC50 to acetylcholine in the asthma model. Cell counts in bronchoalveolar lavage fluid separate a neutrophilic response from an eosinophilic one, and that distinction decides which mechanism a candidate gets credit for. Clinical Imaging follows the same animal over time rather than sampling it once, and containment work runs through the Biosafety Research laboratories integrated with the respiratory suite.
(Cell-counting in BALF in Acute Lung Injury Model)
At Prisys Biotechnologies we run respiratory and immunology programs through these routes, from inhalation and intrabronchial dosing to endotracheal administration.
Contact Us:
bd@prisysbiotech.com
