Table 2.

Treatment of infected macrophages

Compound	Concentration (µg/mL)	Percentage of infected macrophages after treatment	Infectiveness reduction (%)	Number of amastigotes per macrophage
Acarbose	10.0	9.4 ± 0.7	87.4	0.1 ± 0
	5.0	19.8 ± 2.6	73.4	0.5 ± 0.2
	2.5	33.4 ± 5.4	55.1	1.4 ± 0.3
	0	74.4 ± 5.5	(–)	3.3 ± 0.6
Amphotericin B	1.0	24.2 ± 3.0	67.5	1.1 ± 0.2
	0.50	33.6 ± 4.0	54.8	1.8 ± 0.3
	0.25	49.9 ± 3.5	32.9	2.6 ± 0.6
	0	74.4 ± 5.5	(–)	3.3 ± 0.6

Murine macrophages (5 × 10⁵ cells) were incubated in RPMI 1640 medium supplemented with 20% FBS and 20 mM l-glutamine at pH 7.4, for 24 h at 37 °C in 5% CO₂. L. infantum stationary promastigotes were used to infect the macrophages (at a ratio of 10 parasites per one macrophage) for 48 h at 37 °C in 5% CO₂. Free parasites were removed by extensive washing with medium and infected macrophages were treated with ACA (0, 2.5, 5.0 and 10.0 µg/mL) or AmpB (0, 0.25, 0.5 and 1.0 µg/mL) for 48 h at 24 °C in 5% CO₂. Percentage of infected macrophages, infectiveness reduction and the number of recovered amastigotes per cell were determined by counting 200 macrophages, in triplicate. Results are expressed as mean ± standard deviation