Welcome to this week’s (slightly late!) Research Roundup. These posts aim to inform our readers about the many stories that relate to animal research each week. Do you have an animal research story we should include in next week’s Research Roundup? You can send it to us via our Facebook page or through the contact form on the website.
- A new experimental technology can monitor and maintain drug levels in body. The device has a biosensor to monitor drug levels in the body; this can relay information every few seconds to a control unit and pump, which releases additional drugs as necessary. Using rabbits, the researchers were able to keep a constant dosage among all animals in their study – despite physiological and metabolic differences between individual animals. Taking it a step further, the research team introduced secondary drugs that, due to acute drug-drug interactions, would disrupt the levels of the initial drug. However they found levels of the initial drug were stabilised by the sensor. This paper was published in Nature Biomedical Engineering.
- A gene associated with the growth of cancer cells is also implicated with the growth of stem cells. Previous research by this group has implicated the high-mobility group (HMG) gene in the formation of polyps, abnormal growths projecting from the intestinal lining that can be precursors of cancer, in mice. Examining the intestinal cells of these mice localized the HMG active gene and its protein to stem cells buried within the deep grooves in the intestinal lining. These stem cells carrying the HMG gene multiplied far more rapidly and also increased the number of Paneth cells, a type of niche cell known to support intestinal stem cells. This research provides an exciting avenue for future research into processes that could disrupt cancer growth and prevent tumour progression. This study was published in Nature Communications.
- Young people who contract HIV in the UK can now expect to live to a near-normal age thanks to anti-retrovirals. A study in the Lancet of almost 90,000 people showed, “Patients who started Anti-Retroviral Therapy (ART) during 2008–10 whose CD4 counts exceeded 350 cells per μL 1 year after ART initiation have estimated life expectancy approaching that of the general population”. This is 10 years longer than those who started ART in 1996. This breakthrough owes much of its success to animal research that eventually lead to such clinical trials in humans. For example, the ability of AZT, an anti-retroviral medicine more commonly known as Retrovir and Retrovis, to act against HIV (without toxic side effects) was discovered in mice and rats.
Speaking of Research 