News

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.

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:

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.

The 2016 CRACK IT Challenges competition consists of four Challenges identified jointly by the NC3Rs and Sponsors.

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.

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.

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.