News

Through CRACK IT Solutions, Dr Colin Brown (Newcastle University) has secured substantial investment and a new partner to make commercially available his primary human and rat kidney proximal tubule cell model for nephrotoxicity testing (aProximateTM).

Ostara Biomedical is seeking partners with skills in mouse zygote and blastocyst transfer to validate the effectiveness of a novel pessary approach to induce pseudopregnancy and reduce animals in transgenic breeding programmes.

Grants of £30,000 have been awarded by the NC3Rs CRACK IT Solutions programme to support new collaborations in the development and validation of new technologies to reduce animal use.

The 2013 CRACK IT Challenges were launched on 5 September at a meeting in central London.

The Challenges were outlined and the Sponsors met with potential applicants and the CRACK IT Team. There are five 2013 Challenges:

• Untangle
• InPulse
• Inhalation Translation
• NephroTube
• Virtual Infectious Disease Research

Each Challenge offers a research contract of up to £1 million and up to three years to complete the Challenge deliverables.

Professor Robin Williams from Royal Holloway, University of London, has become the first recipient of CRACK IT Solutions funding. Working with GlaxoSmithKline and Syngenta, Professor Williams will use the award to further develop his social amoeba (Dictyostelium discoideum) model of emetic liability and to explore the potential of the model for assessing palatability of new drugs and chemicals. GlaxoSmithKline and Syngenta will provide appropriate test compounds and associated data, as well as their expertise in making the model viable for industrial use.

The CRACK IT call for challenges 2013 is now closed. The new CRACK IT Challenges will be announced in July 2013.