Taconic Insights

In 2010 the ARRIVE (Animals in Research: Reporting In Vivo Experiments) guidelines1 were proposed to address several reproducibility issues with in vivo animal model studies: Only 59% of 271 biomedical studies using rats, mice, or non-human primates that were assessed stated the hypothesis or objective of the study and the number and characteristics of the animals used (i.e., species, strain, sex, age, weight). 87% did not report...

Designing your animal model studies with the 3Rs in mind — Replace, Reduce, Refine — is not only more humane, but can measurably improve the quality and efficiency of your research projects. When we think of improving quality in the life sciences, we might immediately jump to poorly calibrated equipment, expired reagents, or utilizing unvalidated processes. It is obvious that these will have a negative effect on...

Did you miss Dr. Philip Dubé's recent webinar, The Most Important Mouse in the World - Your Guide to the C57BL/6 Mouse? His presentation explored genetic diversity amongst C57BL/6 substrains, the implications for GEM models, and the utility of the C57BL/6 mouse in studies of metabolism, immunology, oncology and behavior. Due to time constraints, many of the questions researchers submitted to his Q&A session went unanswered. Here...

Developing novel drugs for chronic pain management — both more effective and less addictive than opioids — will reduce the number of patients at risk of opioid dependence. Chronic Pain and the Opioid Crisis More than 25% of Americans suffer from chronic pain. This is on par with adults from equivalent regions; between 10-25% of adults in other western countries experience chronic pain, while some estimates of...

Researchers at Georgia State University made a surprising discovery1 while establishing a mouse model of C. difficile infection: a novel, endogenous strain of the bacteria which blooms after antibiotic therapy and protects its host from disease. This could potentially confound experimental results, as the LEM1 strain is inconsistently present among mouse model vendors. C. difficile Genes Appearing Prior to Infection To establish their model, the researchers treated...

The 43rd annual Summer Toxicology forum meeting was held on July 10-12, 2017 in Annapolis Maryland. The afternoon of July 10th was dedicated to a section titled "Use of Humanized Mice for Drug Development". The session was moderated by James Monroe, PhD, senior principle scientist at Merck Research Laboratories, and included presentations by researchers at the FDA, Merck, Yale, and Taconic Biosciences followed by a panel discussion...

Breastfeeding versus formula feeding of infants can be a controversial subject. Those who believe the "breast is best" may be interested in a new study which reports that components in infant formula modify the establishment of a baby's gut microbiota. How Formula Affects the Infant Microbiome Earlier research has shown that gut microbiome varies between formula-fed and breast-fed infants. Now, researchers from the Technical University of Denmark...

In a recent review article, David Masopust and his coauthors from the University of Minnesota Medical School discuss the relevancy of mouse models for use in immunological studies and translatability of immune system studies using SPF mice. Of Mice, Dirty Mice, and Men: Using Mice to Understand Human Immunology1 provides a short introduction to the development of the laboratory mouse while calling out a number of significant...

In December of 2015, Taconic Biosciences published an Insight titled, What do CRISPR, the number 62, and pigs have in common? In that Insight, Dr. George Church of Harvard Medical School explained that his lab had edited 62 genes in pig embryos using CRISPR-Cas9. Their goal was to make pigs better candidates as organ donors for humans. Given their close anatomical size to humans, pigs are thought...

Takeda Pharmaceuticals has joined forces with Marvel Custom Solutions to develop a graphic novel in which the super heroes have Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis, and other characters care for family members or patients with Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD). As part of a Takeda program called IBD Unmasked, the graphic novel was developed in partnership with Marvel. They consulted with an IBD advisory panel consisting of patients...