drug admin. to mice with use of peanut butter? - seeking info (Apr/27/2009 )

My PI has been suggested to mix a drug with peanut butter to feed the mice for testing drug effect~

I was requesting for more info as to the preparation of the mixture and actual administrative method (ie. just deposit the peanut butter mixture through a syringe???) but haven't heard much reply yet. So i couldn't wait and hoping for any inputs from here.

I was wondering how might I be able to ensure that the drug is homogeneous in the peanut butter just by manual mixing~ I also wonder...if the treatment period is long (ie. one month), would the peanut butter cause the mice to get fat and related dieases would manifest?

Thank you for any input!

why peanut butter?

aimikins on Apr 27 2009, 12:05 PM said:

mice love peanut butter.

@tictactoe:
manual mixing should work fine, just make sure that it is thoroughly mixed. if you mix it at a high enough concentration then you can limit the amount of peanut butter the mouse will eat (just hope that the drug doesn't make it taste too bad).

mdfenko on Apr 27 2009, 11:43 AM said:

Thanks alot mdfenko~
Felt kind of relieve that someone who has done it can give me some directions. THANKS!

So how did you deposit the peanut butter to the mice to ensure the correct dosage?

i wasn't using the peanut butter to administer drugs, i used it to bait traps. so i wasn't measuring.

I've used it to bait traps. way better than any other substance.

I was thinking it would be tricky to be accurate with dosing. mice would have to be housed individually...it would be tough to make the dosage controlled.

TicTacToe on Apr 28 2009, 01:51 AM said:

I'm with mdfenko - if you can put enough drug in a small enough volume of PB that they eat it all in one "sitting", that would be ideal. Obviously, it is critical that they eat all of the PB to get the full dose of drug. Also, make sure you know the amount of PB you used, so that you can dose the controls with drug-free PB. A problem with this method is that you'd have to feed the mice one at a time to ensure they all get the same amount.

I haven't used PB fro dosing, but another person on campus did - they quickly opted for having an experimental diet made. I typically prefer gavage.

Good luck,
Sam

SamOH on Apr 29 2009, 01:49 PM said:

Unfortunately, our drug is unstable with short half life so they don't suggest to make it into chow~
That's why they direct us to the use of peanut butter~
But really thanks for suggesting other options~
So..large syringe is not feasible or no one has tried?

Actually, I had encountered a reference saying that they fast the animal before administration of the drug with the peanut butter~ In such case, the mouse should more preferably consume that entire "dosage" more quickly if I deposit it as bait?

Thanks again for all inputs!

TicTacToe on Apr 30 2009, 01:36 AM said:

Fasting would probably help to ensure consumption of a full dose. You could just put it in a small petri dish and let the mouse eat. But again, as others have pointed out, this would have to be done for each mouse individually - so you'd have to house them separately or monitor consumption before returning each mouse to their cage. You could restrain/hold the mouse and use a syringe (as you indicated) to deposit small amounts into the mouth. Depending on the number of mice, this could take a large chunk of your time.

Have you considered gavage?

Sam

SamOH on Apr 30 2009, 07:32 AM said:

Yes, actually I have suggested using gavage~
Apparently because our drug of interest has been used orally for other diseases, i think my boss wants to know its feasibility as an oral drug to treat our disease of interest. So in this case, serving it as food would be more realistic?
And he thought that probably using gavage might take up more time than with peanut butter~~because i haven't done gavage before.