Intravesical dosing in the female Sprague Dawley rat

IAT Congress 2024 -- The test article for this study was an antibiotic to treat urinary tract infections (UTIs), one of the top recurring infectious ailments of the elderly. Whilst many UTIs respond well to antibiotics, it is not uncommon for them to resurface several months later, which is thought to be (amongst other reasons) due to infection of the bladder itself. Most treatments for UTIs involve oral administration of an antibiotic, which relies on systemic exposure to remove microbes within the bladder wall and urinary excretion of the antibiotic to remove microbes within the bladder. In clinical treatments for this test article, the urinary bladder will be catheterised and dose will be instilled; two hours later the patient will be allowed to urinate to remove residual dose. Because we cannot tell the animal not to urinate for a couple of hours, the animal was anaesthetised to facilitate catheterisation and then held under general anaesthesia for an hour after dose administration.