REFINING RESEARCH USING ANIMALS
When studying a disease or the effect of a drug over a period of time, animals would previously have had to be humanely killed and the organs removed for microscopic examination at each time-point. MRI enables the same animal to be repeatedly assessed at each time-point so the number of animals used is reduced.

Moreover, we can get more detailed information about the progress of a disease by more frequent scanning than would be possible if every time-point needed a separate group of animals and resource-intensive technologies such as microscopic examination. Importantly, each animal can often be used as its own control so the statistical power of these studies is enhanced even when using far fewer animals.

Serial MRI allows respiratory biologists to study lung inflammation in rats that mimics some aspects of human asthma. The same animals are scanned, minimising discomfort, for several weeks. This allows chronic inflammatory and other responses to be studied, and the beneficial effects of standard and new drugs to be measured. The MRI approach typically requires 24 animals for a study that would require more than 500 if undertaken using conventional microscopy approaches.

Similar approaches are being taken in our other research areas, such as neurology, psychiatry and cardiovascular diseases, as well as in preclinical safety assessment. The cumulative beneficial impact on the number of animals used and on data quality is therefore very significant.