With Every Drop of Blood by James Lincoln Collier

Also, oral dosing can be stressful with welfare implications for the animal, requiring frequent restraint and invasive procedures. This led us to consider whether oral therapeutic drugs could also be delivered via diet, since ensuring the required dose is achieved via drinking water is difficult, due to spillage or reluctance to drink water containing unpleasant tasting compounds. A test using the MCF-7 breast tumor cell line demonstrated that growth, while slower than in the pellet bearing mice, was sufficient for our studies, with no side effects apart from slight urinary retention, which was eliminated by removing the fortified diet for a few days. After this success, we decided to adopt this same method for 17-β-Estradiol delivery, because these pellets can also cause additional side effects such as bladder calculi and urine scald, which we hoped would be alleviated by changing the delivery method.

Then we tested it using the LNCaP prostate tumor cell line and found it to be as effective in stimulating growth as the pellets. We worked with a commercial diet company to formulate and produce the diet to ensure correct dosage delivery. We decided the best method for both staff and animals would be to supply it in a fortified diet, which would be less invasive and stressful to the animals while being simpler for the staff to deliver. However, due to supply issues with the 5-α-DHT pellets, we had to develop another way to provide this hormone. Traditionally, the supplement was delivered by subcutaneous slow-release pellets. P1 Food for Thought: The Development of Drug-loaded Diets to Improve Both Science and WelfareĪA Ritchie *, P Clarke, P Collier, A GrabowskaĬancer Biology, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, United KingdomĪs an in vivo cancer unit, we grow human tumors in immunodeficient mice such as CD-1 nude, which may require the addition of hormones to promote the growth of prostate and breast tumors.

With Every Drop of Blood by James Lincoln Collier