Fluid Pharma is pleased to announce that it has won the 2020 CRACK IT Challenge – 39 and has been awarded £100k from the National Centre for Replacement, Refinement and Reduction of Animals in Research (NC3Rs). With the award, Fluid Pharma will develop a method that allows tamoxifen to be added to rodent chow without changing its palatability or consumption by the animals for transgenic release.
Tamoxifen is widely used to induce Cre recombination and achieve tissue-specific, conditional gene knockouts in mice. Current methods of dosing tamoxifen to mice are oral gavage (OG) and intraperitoneal (IP) injection, which are invasive and can cause pain and distress in the animal. Commercially available tamoxifen diet is not readily consumed by mice, which can lead to weight loss, due to poor palatability.
Fluid Pharma will apply its proprietary technology MicroCoat to develop a palatable tamoxifen product as taste mask coated micro-pellets. Tamoxifen will be layered onto inert micro-pellet cores and sprayed with a taste-masking polymer membrane which will prevent tamoxifen release in the oral cavity of the mouse. The polymer will dissolve and release tamoxifen in the mouse stomach, allowing its full absorption to exert Cre recombination effects.
The project is sponsored by the Mary Lyon Centre (MRC Harwell Institute), the UK’s national facility for mouse genetics and the use of mouse models for the study of human disease. Scientists at the Mary Lyon Centre will test the new tamoxifen product developed by Fluid Pharma to validate its palatability and recombinase activity.
To find out more on the project and the CRACK IT challenge, the press-release on this award, please visit: