CRACK IT Challenge 36: Animal-free in vitro

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We are excited to announce that ImmuONE™ was awarded funding to carry out the six-month proof-of-concept studies in Phase 1 of this year’s CRACK IT Challenges competition organised by the NC3Rs. Sponsored by Unilever and AstraZeneca, this challenge aims to adapt established OECD test guidelines for in vitro assays so that they are free from animal-derived products to improve human relevance and reproducibility and help drive the uptake of animal-free reagents.

Dr Victoria Hutter, CSO at ImmuONE™ is leading a multi-disciplinary consortium including PAN Biotech and the University of Oxford to answer this challenge. The team combines expertise in serum replacement, in vitro innovations and pre-clinical assessment to develop these solutions into marketable products and services that will have a significant impact on the 3Rs across the bioscience sector.

“It’s wonderful to be working with such a skilled and focussed team to address this Challenge,” says Victoria. “The NC3Rs, Unilever and AstraZeneca have put forward a very pertinent Challenge in the bioscience industry and we’ve put together a team that spans a breadth of expertise, from innovators to end users, to address it. As a result, we hope the benefits of entirely animal-product free approaches will be realised across the sector.”

One of the ultimate goals of the full Challenge is to deliver adapted OECD test guideline protocols which are free from animal-derived products and can be transferred to other laboratories to facilitate industry uptake.

“Whilst animal-free alternatives for cell culture and biological assessment exist, unfortunately their uptake by the scientific community has been slow,” says Victoria. “We aim to change this and demonstrate that completely animal product-free alternatives are possible and equivalent or better to standard animal product-containing reagents.”

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