Four sizes of chews were available: 0.5 g, 1.25 g, 3 g and 6 g, containing respectively 11.3 mg, 28.3 mg, 68 mg and 136 mg of afoxolaner. As the soft chews cannot be cut, the dosing was administered by giving one or more of the NVP-BGJ398 clinical trial chews to be as close as possible to the minimum effective dose of 2.5 mg/kg, resulting in an average dose of 2.7 mg/kg of afoxolaner

per each treated group (Table 1). Dogs were fasted overnight prior to treatment and fed approximately four h after treatment in Study A but were fed in the hour before treatment in Studies B and C. On Days −2, 7, 14, 21 and 28, all dogs were infested with 50 unfed adult ticks (with approximately equal sex ratio for D. reticulatus in Studies A and B, and 50 females of I. ricinus, with 10 additional males to stimulate attachment, in Study C). Ticks were from laboratory-maintained populations that had been established from ticks collected in field locations

in Europe. Live ticks were counted and removed 48 h after treatment or infestations on Days 2, 9, 16, 23, and 30. These counts consisted of the methodical examination of all body areas using finger tips and/or a coarse tooth comb to sort through the hair and locate all ticks on the http://www.selleckchem.com/products/incb28060.html animal, as described by Marchiondo et al. (2013). All personnel conducting tick counts and health observations were blinded to treatment groups. For each tick count, including male and female ticks, the total count of live adult ticks was transformed to the natural logarithm of (count + 1) to either calculate the geometric mean for each treatment group. The percent reduction of the tick counts from treated dogs compared to those from untreated dogs (= percentage efficacy) was calculated using the formula [(C − T)/C] × 100, where C is the geometric mean for the control

group and T is the geometric mean for the treated group at the same time point. The tick counts of the treated and untreated groups were also compared using Friedman’s test. All testing was two-sided at the significance level p = 0.05. For each study, the therapeutic efficacy of afoxolaner against Day −2 infestation and the efficacy of afoxolaner in the prevention of weekly tick re-infestations starting on Day 7 after treatment were assessed. In the control groups, the geometric mean of live ticks counted at each time point was between 19.9 and 32.3 for infestations with D. reticulatus and between 23.4 and 34.2 for I. ricinus ( Table 2). To allow the comparison between control and treated groups, the minimum retention rate of ticks should be at least 20% (i.e., 10 ticks for an infestation with 50) in order to make a valid assessment of tick efficacy ( Marchiondo et al., 2013). The control dogs were adequately infested in the 3 studies. In the treated groups, the tick reduction was significant (p < 0.002) compared to the control groups for each time point of each study ( Table 3).