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Two of our CRACK IT Challenges are being showcased on a webinar on hosted by Inside Scientific- “24/7 monitoring of group-housed rodents in their true IVC racked home cage environment for safety pharmacology and phenotyping applications.”
Challenge Sponsors Dr Will Redfern (Astra Zeneca) and Dr Sara Wells (MRC Harwell) are presenting their webinar on Tuesday 28 April describing the origins and development of the Challenges before describing the impact of the technology developed by Challenge winners Actual Analytics. Launched in 2011 and 2012 respectively, the Challenges Rodent Big Brother and Rodent Little Brother looked to similar core technology to benefit the scientific data collected in their individual research programmes.
Rodent Big Brother, sponsored by Astra Zeneca looked to develop 24/7 homecage monitoring of activity and temperature in the home cage of rodents taking part in safety pharmacology studies. The ability to monitor animals in their home cage environment avoids the need for surgery or single housing, reduces the number of animals needed for a study, delivers welfare benefits to the animals used and, through the incorporation of additional measurements into existing study types, reduces the number of studies needed overall.
This core technology was then developed further and applied to the phenotyping of mouse models of neurodegeneration in Rodent Little Brother, sponsored by MRC Harwell. The application of this innovative system will now impact on refinement and reduction of studies using mouse models of nervous system disorders. These are disease models where pain, suffering and lasting harm can be difficult to assess and where earlier humane endpoints and interventions are needed. Additionally, animals will not be needed to be moved to unfamiliar cages or be singly housed for testing and fewer animals will be needed because less variable data will be obtained from individuals.
The technology developments from these two Challenges provide the capability for reduction and refinement of all in vivo studies where changes in activity, temperature and behaviour are assessed.
Details:
Tuesday, April 28th @ 11:00am EDT