Associate Scientist Evotec SE Verona, Veneto, Italy
The taste of an oral medication is a critical quality attribute for therapeutic adherence and patient compliance, especially in children. The brief-access taste assessment (BATA) is an in vivo screening tool with great promise in providing the assessment of APIs aversiveness that may predict human taste responses. The BATA assay operationally defines aversive taste as suppression of the rate at which a rodent licks from sipper tubes that deliver tasting solutions or suspensions.
To validate a BATA model in our facility, independent groups of naïve male rats were given access to different compounds with a randomized sequence of compounds presentation. We performed different trials with quinine hydrochloride, sucrose and commercial masking solution. The different independent experiments performed demonstrated the validity of the model to discriminate increasing concentration of bitter taste using quinine hydrochloride solutions while no differences were found when comparing different increasing concentration of sucrose with water.
Learning Objectives:
To define BATA model
To demonstrate the importance of this preclinical model in reducing timeframe of early-phase compound screening
To define BATA application for formulation development