Design and evaluation of an aerosol infection chamber for small animals

In this report, we describe the design of an aerosol exposure chamber to reproducibly produce uniformly distributed clouds of droplet nuclei. The device can deliver desired number of bacilli (20-2000) in lungs of mice. All safety measures to handle infectious bacteria hake been incorporated in the design and it is controlled remotely by a personal computer. It is an indispensable device to study the protective efficacy of vaccine candidates against Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection. This de ice would also be useful to studs immunization and drug delivery by nasal route in experimental animals. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.