Resumen

PADRON-NIEVES, Maritza  y  PONTE-SUCRE, Alicia. Resistence markers in Leishmania: in vitro susceptibility to leishmanicidal drugs vs. calcein retention isolated from patients. AVFT [online]. 2013, vol.32, n.2, pp.29-33. ISSN 0798-0264.

Chemo-resistance screening with cell markers is easy to quantify but has not been implemented for leishmaniasis. In this paper we compared the in vitro susceptibility to classical and experimental drugs with calcein retention by parasites isolated from patients with Diffuse Cutaneous Leishmaniasis, suffering chemotherapeutic failure to Glucantime. Calcein is a natural ABC transporter substrate and its accumulation reflects the activity of MDR1 and MRP1 transporters. The results were compared with those obtained from WHOreference Leishmania strains. Our results suggest that the screening of Leishmania promastigotes drug susceptibility is easy, fast and reproducible, but not necessarily predictive of the chemo-resistant phenotype. Moreover, the results demonstrate that the evaluation of calcein retention differentiates the studied isolates according to their ability to express different ABC transporters and suggest that this methodology could be part of a scheme for diagnosis and treatment of leishmaniasis as predictive of leishmanicidal therapy.

Palabras clave : Leishmania; drugs susceptibility; Chemo-resistance; calcein retention; ABC transporters.