News | Innovation Platform

New Solution: Neuroinflammation and nociception in a dish

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.

19 October 2016

£1.5 million for 3Rs research to improve gene therapy safety and skin metabolism prediction

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.

CRACK IT Challenges is an innovation 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.

10 October 2016

2016 CRACK IT Challenges Competition is now open

The 2016 CRACK IT Challenges were launched on 8 September at an event in central London.

The Challenges were outlined and the Sponsors met with potential applicants and the CRACK IT team.

There are four 2016 Challenges:

12 September 2016

Metrion Biosciences joins CRACK IT

Metrion Biosciences Ltd has joined the network of partners involved in the DRGNET CRACK IT Challenge. The project, headed by the University of Glasgow, aims to enable access to primary human dorsal root ganglion (DRG) neurones for drug target identification and pharmacological testing.

23 August 2016

2016 CRACK IT Challenges announced

The 2016 CRACK IT Challenges competition consists of four Challenges identified jointly by the NC3Rs and Sponsors. This year the competition is funded by the NC3Rs, co-funding provided by Arthritis Research UK (“Osteo-chip”) and ESPRC (“Osteo-chip” and “Maximise”) and supported by Innovate UK (SBRI) with in-kind contribution from the Sponsors.

15 August 2016

New Solution: Non-invasive in vivo tissue imaging with functional optical coherence tomography (OCT)

Researchers at the University of Dundee, working in collaboration with the University of Washington, have developed functional OCT; a non-invasive and high resolution in vivo imaging technique. The technology enables ultrafast imaging of tissue structure and provides information on functional parameters that correlate with the pathological status of the tissue.

10 August 2016

Reducing animal use in Bipolar Affective Disorder

An Edinburgh based team are archiving stem cells from patients with bipolar disorder so that they can be shared with scientists worldwide to help reduce the use of animals in research.

The team were awarded funding in 2011 in the inaugural competition of the NC3Rs open innovation competition CRACK IT Challenges.

09 August 2016

A novel social amoeba model to reduce late phase attrition in drug development

A recent publication describes a novel approach to assessing the palatability of new drugs using the amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum instead of rodents. The work was funded through an NC3Rs CRACK IT Solutions technology partnering award.

03 August 2016