News

University of Leeds and SimOmics Ltd win CRACK IT Challenges competition.

Six teams have been awarded over half a million pounds of funding for proof-of-concept studies.

Research into retinal disease and development of new ophthalmic drugs utilises a large number of animals, however the results are not always easily extrapolated to humans. OcuScience offer an alternative and unique platform based on human tissue, providing a more physiologically relevant system. The platform comprises neural retina from human donor eyes coupled to a proprietary system for conducting repeated trans-retinal recordings.

EU-based academics and SMEs whose technology is featured on the NC3Rs CRACK IT Solutions partnering platform will now be able to apply for funding of up to £50k to support collaborations that are identified through the platform.

An innovative project has been awarded funding through the NC3Rs CRACK IT Solutions partnering programme which supports collaborations to develop and validate new technologies with commercial and 3Rs potential.

ZeClinics aims to develop and commercialise "ZeCardio: High-throughput cardiotoxicity screening (HTS) with zebrafish embryo", an automated platform capable of analysing multiple parameters relating to the physiology of the heart and vascular system of zebrafish larvae.

Research in the field of pain and neuroinflammation is currently conducted either in vivo or on isolated cells cultured in vitro. Although working in vivo offers the obvious advantage of maintaining an intact neuronal circuitry, this type of approach is technically very demanding and suffers from a high degree of variability in the nociceptive responses between individuals and sets of experiments.

We have awarded £1.5 million to the winners of the annual NC3Rs CRACK IT Challenges competition, run using the Small Business Research Initiative (SBRI) process which is supported by Innovate UK.