Scientists are increasingly turning to non-invasive imaging to further the ’3Rs’ of work in animals — replacement, refinement and reduction. Although the use of animals in modern medicine and biology is essential, researchers are actively working to reduce the numbers used and improve on how they are used.
Medical technologies, such as computed tomography (CT) scans and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), together with imaging techniques specific to biology, can assist in this.
“The big trend is combining all the available techniques together in the same animal, increasing the amount of information we get out of the subject,” says François Lassailly, a biologist specializing in imaging at the Cancer Research UK London Research Institute (LRI). “This is beneficial to the animals and beneficial to the science.”
For example, he told a conference in London last week, if you want to investigate disease progression in an animal model, you would normally have to sacrifice a few of your study group every week or so. But by using imaging, you can look at disease progression through the lifetimes of individual animals and thus drastically reduce the number used. Imaging also offers the possibility of looking at several biomarkers at once, thereby answering more questions in a single experiment.
With Lassailly’s help, teams at the LRI are using micro-CT to detect lung tumours in animals. They are also using optical imaging, for example with cancer cells that have been engineered to emit light to image tumours inside animal subjects.
A key concept, says Lassailly, is that researchers should be treating an ‘ani-patient’ — so that the study of the animal mimics the treatment of a patient in the clinic. This includes applying all the scanning and imaging techniques to which a hospital doctor would have access and thus bridging the gap between the laboratory and the clinic.
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