Development of a novel cell based bitter taste assessment assay

In the production of a medicine for oral administration, palatability is an important consideration. This is of particular importance to ensure patient adherence, compliance and effective therapeutic outcome and is of utmost significance where medicines are intended for paediatric and geriatric use. Animal taste evaluation using rodents is the most commonly used method and involves either surgical proedures or prolonged experimental protocols which can lead to animal distress. Recently, we have isolated, cultured and characterised taste receptor cells in terms of their morphology, presence of proteins responsible for taste transduction, as well as developed qualitative and quantitative assays for taste identification and differentiation. The current project aims to build on these findings to develop a high throughput and cost effective quantitative assay to differentiate the taste for bitter compounds.