Pulmonary delivery of Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG with vibrating mesh and jet nebulisers
Alex Seungyeon Byun1, Luis Vitetta1, Hak-Kim Chan1 & Philip Chi Lip Kwok1
1School of Pharmacy, Faculty of Medicine and Health, The University of Sydney, New South Wales 2006, Australia
Summary
Probiotics are commonly used to improve gastrointestinal symptoms and maintain health. Studies have frequently demonstrated the positive effects that oral probiotics exert not only in the gastrointestinal tract but also the respiratory tract. There is sufficient evidence to support that oral probiotics can reduce the incidence and severity of upper respiratory tract infections, thereby reducing antimicrobial use. In the past decade, some animal studies have examined the effects of intranasal probiotics on the respiratory tract, but nebulised probiotics have not yet to be explored. Therefore, this study compared the dose output and aerosol performance of probiotics nebulised from vibrating mesh and jet nebulisers. The vibrating mesh nebuliser (VMN) consistently produced a higher output than the jet nebuliser (JN) for Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG in both phosphate-buffered saline (PBS) and normal saline (0.9% w/v sodium chloride in water) at 23.18 ± 0.99% and 10.43 ± 3.99%, respectively. For both nebulisers, probiotic in PBS outperformed its saline counterpart. A similar trend was observed with the fine particle fraction as it was higher for PBS (12.95 ± 0.96% for VMN; 11.21 ± 0.18% for JN) than normal saline (7.51 ± 2.01% for VMN; 7.03 ± 2.48% for JN) for both nebulisers, suggesting that aerosol performance of nebulised probiotics may also depend on the medium in which the probiotics were suspended in. Therefore, this study demonstrated that the type of nebuliser as well as the vehicle of the probiotic suspension affected the effectiveness of nebulisation.