Rational design of oral flubendazole-loaded nanoemulsion for brain delivery in cryptococcosis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cryptococcal meningitis is caused by Cryptococcus spp. and predominantly affects patients with acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. However, an increase in the number of nonHIV patients diagnosed with cryptococcosis raises concerns worldwide. The current antifungal therapy has some limitations such as being unavailable in some countries, high cost, toxicity, and the need for trained professionals for intravenous administration, which compromises patient compliance, resulting in treatment withdrawal and increased fungal resistance. In this regard, new alternative drugs, especially those administered orally and at affordable cost are desired. However, these drugs face challenges due to the gastrointestinal (GI) and blood-brain barriers (BBB). In this present work, we developed a new oil-in-water nanoemulsion containing flubendazole (FLZ) for oral administration using a unique low-energy process for treating cryptococcosis. The combination of D-phase emulsification (DPE) process and design of experiment (DoE) resulted in a stable FLZ-loaded nanoemulsion with 35-nm mean particle size, 60.0% oil phase with 3.0% surfactant phase (both % w/w), at 25 °C process temperature without using specific equipment. The careful selection of components for developing this nanoemulsion as a drug carrier is thoroughly discussed herein, including the interaction of lipid components with brain transporters, the type of surfactant as a permeability enhancer through BBB, as well as the choice of the drug. The use of statistical design combined with the DPE process, and selection of components, resulted in reducing approximately 30% of fungal burden in mice brain, and safety testing in an invertebrate model showed nontoxicity by this nanoemulsion. This work reports a step-by-step alternative process for designing a nanoemulsion with improved efficacy and safety, even containing a drug at a significantly reduced concentration compared to previously published works. This nanoemulsion provides multiple benefits - overcoming GI and BBB barriers, and affordable production cost - delivering a new antifungal alternative for treating cryptococcosis.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".