Summaries of 2022 research
Lay summaries of research that involved animals in 2022.
As part of the Concordat on Openness on Animal Research in the UK, we provide lay summaries of research that involves animals for all new granted project licences.
In vivo models of joint degeneration
What animals are you planning to use?
Mice and rats.
For what purpose are the animals going to be used?
Our project aims to understand why people develop the musculoskeletal condition osteoarthritis which affects joints including the knees and hips. This will allow us to test therapies which could stop or reverse the disease. Eight million people suffer with osteoarthritis in the UK and there is no drug that can prevent the disease progressing; the only option available during later stages of the disease is joint replacement surgery. Drugs are therefore needed to target this condition which affects mobility, quality of life and mental well-being. Altered loading of the joints, similar to that seen with sporting injuries, will be applied and drugs administered to assess whether joint damage can be halted, and osteoarthritis prevented.
What will be the harms to those animals and how will these be limited?
Osteoarthritis is a painful condition, but animals are given painkillers at the time of injury, are monitored daily for their well-being to ensure harm is limited and given further pain medication if needed throughout the study.
What alternatives did you consider before embarking on the use of animals in your research?
To assess how good a drug is for treating osteoarthritis and ensure it doesn’t have unintended side effects, we need to test it in an animal. However, we are developing non-animal models and use both 3D cell culture systems and computational models to add information to the animal studies and reduce the number of animals required.
What will be the expected benefits?
The study will increase knowledge of how osteoarthritis develops enabling us to test drugs that may prevent disease and improve the health and well-being of sufferers.
Mechanisms and rescue of absence seizures and their psychiatric comorbidities
What animals are you planning to use?
Mice and rats.
For what purpose are the animals going to be used?
The primary purpose of this licence is the characterization of the mechanisms of generation and termination of absence seizures and their psychiatric comorbidities. Moreover, this project will identify targets that control both absence seizures and their neuropsychiatric comorbidities.
What will be the harms to those animals and how will these be limited?
None of the animals will experience any long-lasting adverse effect while about 5% may experience some mild or moderate discomfort of very short duration. The use of current-state-of-the-art techniques and appropriate husbandry conditions will limit the occurrence and duration of any adverse effects.
What alternatives did you consider before embarking on the use of animals in your research?
Immortalized cell lines and biophysical computer models
What will be the expected benefits?
We expect early-stage (Phase 1) clinical studies on the use of endogenous substances against absence seizures and their comorbidities to be initiated towards the end of this project, whereas the synthesis and testing of novel exogenous substances may require longer efforts (5-10 years). Children, teenagers and adults with absence seizures will be the main cohorts benefiting from this project, including individuals with childhood absence epilepsy, juvenile absence epilepsy, juvenile myoclonic epilepsy, epilepsy with myoclonic absences, Dravet syndrome and Lennox-Gastaut syndrome.
Lay summaries by year
Consideration of the 3Rs is the basis of everything we do related to animal research.