News

New automated home cage monitoring system for rats allows the behaviour of individual rats to be monitored and analysed whilst socially housed in their home cages.

Two teams have each been awarded £1million of funding to deliver Phase 2 of the 2016 CRACK IT Challenges.

CRACK IT Challenges is a competition funded by the NC3Rs that brings together large industries, academia and SMEs to facilitate new business processes and product development that will have a significant impact on the use of animals in research.

The funding has been awarded to solve two Challenges:

New ultra lightweight TaiNi system represents a significant refinement for mice used in neurological research.

The 2017 CRACK IT Challenges competition consists of three Challenges in the area of toxicology.

It is widely acknowledged that animal models are not always accurate predictors of the effects of a substance on humans, other animals or the environment, and many compounds fail to translate to the clinic because of this. This attrition limits the development of safe and effective new chemical entities (NCEs) and therapeutics and is a major financial burden, providing significant incentive to develop an in silico platform that can inform researchers as to the most appropriate model system (if any) for investigating the efficacy or toxicity of a given compound.

Fundamental and pharmacological studies in pain require nociceptive threshold testing (NTT) to detect increases or decreases in sensitivity to a noxious stimulus. Thermal and mechanical sensitivity testing is very widely used in such research, and rodents, primarily mice, are the most common species studied. Testing with von Frey filaments and hot plate technology, principally the Hargreaves system, are currently the accepted methods for mechanical and heat testing respectively. However, these have a number of scientific and animal welfare limitations.

The winning team of the CRACK IT Challenge InMutaGene led by GeneWerk, has created a website to showcase the assay they are developing to improve the safety of novel gene therapy products without using animals.

There is a growing market to develop tests for the straightforward, fast and low-cost detection of biomolecules. The recognition element in these tests is traditionally based on antibodies, which are expensive, relatively unstable and require the use of animals in their production. Polymers, or “plastic” antibodies, are able to mimic the properties of natural antibodies and are able to overcome these drawbacks.