News | Innovation Platform

28 April: Webinar showcasing two CRACK IT Challenges

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.”

21 April 2015

Novel technologies to overcome challenges faced by the pharmaceutical and chemical industries

https://nc3rs.org.uk/crackit/qsars-mixIndustry, small and medium sized enterprises and academia are coming together, through the NC3Rs CRACK IT programme, to solve three challenges faced by the pharmaceutical and chemical industries; all of which should reduce the number of animals used in scientific research.

27 February 2015

CRACK IT Challenge winners awarded £4.9 million to further their research

The NC3Rs open innovation platform, CRACK IT, has awarded £4.9 million in its annual challenge-led competition, run in collaboration with the UK’s innovation agency, Innovate UK, formerly known as the Technology Strategy Board.

04 September 2014

2014 CRACK IT Challenges announced

The 2014 CRACK IT Challenges competition consists of three Challenges identified jointly by the NC3Rs and Sponsors. This year the competition is funded by the NC3Rs and supported by the Technology Strategy Board's Small Business Research Initiative with in-kind contribution from the Sponsors. There are seven Sponsors (Unilever, GlaxoSmithKline, Abbvie, Sanofi, BASF, Shell and Dow Agrosciences).

Full details of the Challenges and Sponsors can be found here.

31 July 2014

Solutions partnering leads to commercialisation

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).

30 July 2014

New Solution: reducing animals in transgenic breeding programmes

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.

21 March 2014

Solutions funding awarded for 3Rs technology development

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.

25 September 2013

2013 Challenges Competition is now open

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.

05 September 2013