The pharmacologic effect of an antibiotic is directly related to its unbound concentration at the site of infection. Most commercial antibiotics have been selected in part for their low propensity to interact with serum proteins. These nonspecific interactions are classically evaluated by measuring the MIC in the presence of serum. As higher-throughput technologies tend to lose information, surface plasmon resonance (SPR) is emerging as an informative medium-throughput technology for hit validation. Here we show that SPR is a useful automatic tool for quantification of the interaction of model antibiotics with serum proteins and that it delivers precise real-time kinetic data on this critical parameter.Serum proteins play an important role in binding to many drugs, including antibiotics. In general, serum proteins decrease the free fraction of antibiotic available for the elimination of bacteria, since only the non-protein-bound molecules are pharmacologically active. The proteins involved in this sequestration are mainly human serum albumin (HSA), the most abundant serum protein (4% wt/vol); ␣-1-acid glycoprotein (AGP); and gamma globulin (5, 7, 11).Currently, most of the reports of the inhibitory effects of serum proteins on antibiotics are derived from in vitro studies that have employed the MIC method (3, 9) or time-killing curves (16). The findings described in those reports correlate well with in vivo data (13) and are useful for evaluation of the potential of a new drug candidate. However, it is also necessary to rapidly and precisely characterize how a molecule binds to serum proteins in terms of affinity constants to drive the synthesis of new and more efficient analogs. A variety of physical techniques for measurement of the levels of protein binding have been proposed. The most classical are ultracentrifugation (3) and dialysis (3,8); but other alternative techniques have been used, like circular dichroism analysis (1) and extrinsic fluorescence analysis (15). More recently, surface plasmon resonance (SPR) was proposed as a medium-to high-throughput alternative for evaluation of the kinetics of relatively lipophilic drugs that bind to human serum proteins in real time (14).Antibiotics are characterized as having a relatively high hydrophilicity compared to the hydrophilicities of other drug classes. Consequently, antibiotics have lower affinities for serum proteins. Because the development of fast analytical methods that allow the measurement of antibiotic-serum protein interaction kinetics with a small amount of sample is desirable, we have evaluated if SPR can measure low affinities and how SPR can be used to prescreen rapidly libraries of antibiotic candidates for their propensity to bind to serum proteins.
MATERIALS AND METHODSBacterial strains, antimicrobial agents, and media. Staphylococcus aureus reference strain CIP 76.25 (ATCC 25923) was used. S. aureus was grown, subcultured, and quantified in Mueller-Hinton broth and on Mueller-Hinton agar (Difco Laboratories, Detroit, MI). Antimicrobial ag...