Development of a therapeutic delivery platform with reduced colonization potential.

Bacterial biotherapeutic delivery vehicles have the potential to treat a variety of diseases. This approach obviates the need to purify the recombinant effector molecule, allows delivery of therapeutics via oral or intranasal administration, and protects the effector molecule during gastrointestinal transit. Lactic acid bacteria have been broadly developed as therapeutic delivery vehicles though risks associated with the colonization of a genetically modified microorganism have so-far not been addressed.

Host cell-specific metabolism of linoleic acid controls growth in cell culture.

The obligate intracellular parasite can infect and replicate in any warm-blooded cell tested to date, but much of our knowledge about cell biology comes from just one host cell type: human foreskin fibroblasts (HFFs). To expand our knowledge of host-parasite lipid interactions, we studied in intestinal epithelial cells, the first site of host-parasite contact following oral infection and the exclusive site of parasite sexual development in feline hosts. We found that highly metabolic Caco-2 cells are permissive to growth even when treated with high levels of linoleic acid (LA), a polyunsaturated fatty acid (PUFA) that kills parasites in HFFs.