You’re listening to the September episode of 3 Minute 3Rs.
The papers behind the pod:
1. Multicellular 3D Neurovascular Unit Model for Assessing Hypoxia and Neuroinflammation Induced Blood-Brain Barrier Dysfunction. Scientific Reports https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-66487-8
2. Automated and rapid self-report of nociception in transgenic mice. Scientific Reports https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-70028-8
3. Zebrafish as an alternative animal model in human and animal vaccination research Laboratory Animal Research https://labanimres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s42826-020-00042-4
Transcript:
It’s the 3rd Thursday of September, and you’re listening to 3 Minute 3Rs, your monthly recap of efforts to replace, reduce, and refine the use of animals in research. This month, we’ll let mice do the talking and hear about using zebrafish to study vaccines. But let’s start with an update on an organoid.
[NC3Rs] Back in 2018, Goodwell Nzou and colleagues from the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in the United States published their microscopic replica of the human brain, formed from the six major neural cell types including neurons and immune cells. This miniature organ, or organoid, not only promoted the formation of a blood brain barrier, the resultant barrier was also functional.
Fast forward to today, and in a publication in Scientific Reports, Nzou et al have demonstrated how this platform could be used in drug screening. Disruption of the blood brain barrier in neurological disorders, such as ischaemic stroke, is common, exacerbating the injury to the brain and contributing to cognitive impairment. By culturing the organoid in hypoxic conditions, replicating low oxygen resultant from a stroke, they were able to show expression of proteins critical for blood brain barrier function were altered, leaving the barrier disrupted and leaky.
Inducing ischaemic stroke in rodents is associated with significant welfare concerns, including death, weight loss, sensorimotor defects and seizures. Using organoids can replace some of these experiments in disease modelling and therapeutic development, so this new publication could have big implications for the 3Rs. You can find out more by following the link in the description.
[Lab Animal] Next, some self-reporting of pain. Mice are inevitably used to study the mechanisms underlying nociception, with the goal of better understanding pain in people and how to treat it. Many studies rely on reflex assays, but interpreting these can be subjective and there’s uncertainty about what the mice are feeling and reacting to. This can limit study of the neuronal pathways involved and the affective components of pain perception.
A new study in the journal Scientific Reports presents an assay in which transgenic mice learn to self-report exposure to a nociceptive stimulus. The mice, head fixed in the current study, were trained to lick a water spout in response to optogenetic stimulation of heat-sensing neurons in their hind paw. The authors suggest that self-reporting may provide a quicker read-out of nociception that may better reflect the animals’ affective state, and hopefully help make results with the mice more translationally relevant.
And we’ll finish with a topic that’s likely on many of our minds: vaccines.
[NA3RsC] You are probably aware of the recent push to develop a vaccine for COVID-19. Before these vaccines are given to people...
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Assessing enrichment, consolidating animal research guidance and understanding mouse aggression
Replacing animal-derived reagents, simulating in utero microinjections and clicker training for mouse gait assessment
Kidney organoid vascularisation, implementing masking and quantitatively assessing experiment severity
Assessing pain, living systematic reviews and inducing focal hypoxia in human neurons
Statistical planning, human cell cultures for toxoplasma and preventing boredom in laboratory rodents
Larger species refinement special: improving the welfare of rabbits, non-human primates and sheep
Better behavioural research, imaging with microbots and how housing density affects mouse microbiomes
3Rs Prize: A benchtop organ-on-a-chip fabrication method and an ex vivo model of focal demyelination
Humane intervention points, virtual gene knockout and ex vivo brain slices for Parkinson's research
Microbrains for neurotoxicity testing, improved experimental design, and post-op severity assessment
How environment and experimenter affect reproducibility, ex vivo adipocytes, and rodent enrichment
Replacement methods for drug development, toxicology testing and cardiovascular research
Issues with conventional rodent housing, playpens for rats, and using sleep to assess welfare
Reproducibility in cancer biology, training rats for refined fMRI, and playpens for mice
Refining anaesthesia and euthanasia for zebrafish and mice
Discover the winners of this year's Global AAALAC/IQ Awards
People and strategies behind 3Rs science: compassion fatigue, culture of care and systematic reviews
3 Minute 3Rs September 2021
3 Minute 3Rs August 2021
3 Minute 3Rs July 2021
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