News

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.

Current immunogenicity testing of drugs considers only the ‘antigenicity’ of the drug molecule, i.e. the ability of a compound to stimulate antibody production. However, true immunogenicity must also take into account anything that can cause an immune response or generate the conditions to initiate an immune response (e.g. tissue damage). Any drug has the potential to cause unwanted tissue damage which in turn increases the probability of immune-mediated (secondary) pathology.

There are two key areas in tumour biology that must be considered when developing models to study the disease – tumour heterogeneity and the tumour microenvironment (TME). Current cancer models including cell lines, organoids or, more recently, in vivo patient-derived xenograft (PDX) models often fail to recapitulate these elements sufficiently, and so numerous new treatments that have been developed based on these models do not perform well when moved forward into the clinic.