Santos Anamaria Mendonça, Santana Júnior Cláudio Carvalho, Nascimento Júnior José Adão Carvalho, Oliveira Ana Maria Santos, Rajkumar Gomathi, Alves Izabel Almeida, Serafini Mairim Russo
Postgraduate Program in Health Sciences, Federal University of Sergipe, Aracaju, Sergipe, Brazil.
Postgraduate Program in Pharmaceutical Sciences, Federal University of Sergipe, São Cristóvão, Sergipe, Brazil.
Biol Futur. 2025 Aug 21. doi: 10.1007/s42977-025-00284-0.
Insects are considered as an alternative in vivo model for evaluating various biological activities. Among them, larvae stand out as experimental model due to the low economic value during maintenance, in addition to the low demand and easy handling. Tenebrio molitor larvae are receiving attention as alternative methods in determination of efficacy studies. Therefore, the present study aimed to review experimental models that use T. molitor larvae as alternatives in defining the biological activities, safety, and effectiveness of new drugs. The current review was conducted using online journal databases: PubMed, Web of Science, and Embase without geographical, publication date, or filtering restrictions. The search obtained a total of 5781 documents which were evaluated according to the focus of the review, reaching 14 articles. Thus, the systematic search strategy was developed to encompass all published papers that explore the use of larvae in experimental studies, particularly those investigating the biological activity and/or characterization of drugs/compounds. The selected articles were classified according to the methodologies used, such as toxicity, antimicrobial, and other types of assessments. Despite the results, there is still a lack of studies that use this model as a source for evaluating drugs and possible therapies.
昆虫被视为评估各种生物活性的替代体内模型。其中，幼虫因其饲养成本低、需求少且易于处理而成为实验模型。黄粉虫幼虫作为确定药效研究的替代方法正受到关注。因此，本研究旨在综述使用黄粉虫幼虫作为替代方法来界定新药的生物活性、安全性和有效性的实验模型。本综述使用在线期刊数据库进行：PubMed、科学网和Embase，不受地理、出版日期或筛选限制。检索共获得5781篇文献，根据综述重点进行评估，最终得到14篇文章。因此，制定了系统的检索策略，以涵盖所有探索在实验研究中使用幼虫的已发表论文，特别是那些研究药物/化合物的生物活性和/或特性的论文。所选文章根据使用的方法进行分类，如毒性、抗菌和其他类型的评估。尽管有这些结果，但仍缺乏将该模型用作评估药物和可能疗法来源的研究。
