The Effect of Oseltamivir on the Disease Progression of Lethal Influenza A Virus Infection: Plasma Cytokine and miRNA Responses in a Mouse Model

Figure 3

Effect of oseltamivir treatment on cytokine levels in lethal influenza A virus infected mice. Changes in cytokine concentrations [IL-6 (a), KC/GRO (b), IFN-γ (c), and IL-10 (d)] over time in plasma samples from mice infected with lethal mouse adapted influenza A/Puerto Rico/8/34 (H1N1) virus and treated either with oseltamivir phosphate or water. For the prophylactic group [(a)–(d) (i)], mice were infected with 1000 TCID50 virus and treated 2 h before infection with oseltamivir. The therapeutic groups were infected with 1000 TCID50 [(a)–(d) (ii)] or 100 TCID50 [(a)–(d) (iii)] virus and treated 24 h after infection. Prophylactic and therapeutic groups () were administered with oseltamivir 10 mg/kg by oral gavage twice daily for 5 days. An infected group () gavaged with distilled water was added as control for each experiment. On days 1–10 after infection plasma samples were collected from sacrificed mice and cytokine levels were measured by Mesoscale ELISA. Levels were indicated as pg/mL of plasma. For the purpose of analysis, cytokine levels below the detection limit were set to the lower limit of detection in each case. To ascertain significance, two tailed, two sample unequal variances Student’s -test was used (, , and ).

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