Evaluating ultrasound treatment in rats and mice for drug delivery purposes

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In the research sphere of Prof. Catharina Davies (NTNU) we are developing new treatment modalities that aim at improving nanomedicine delivery to tumors and the brain by utilizing ultrasound and microbubbles. Often we need to perform preliminary studies to optimize an ultrasound setting, nanoparticle or microbubble. For our different studies we have started breeding of 3 different strains of animals (rats and mice) and these breeding programs generate a lot of spare animals that are not of the correct genotype for the type of experiments we are planning.

These animals are generally euthanized under anesthesia, unless needed for setting up new breeding pairs. Many of our preliminary studies can be performed in a wild type animal as well as in one with the correct phenotype. These experiments are generally terminal, meaning that the animal will not wake up from anesthesia and hence will not experience any more discomfort than it would from euthanization.

In this project we propose to that these spare animals can be used to test out settings related to ultrasound parameters, nanoparticle characteristics and microbubble characteristics. We are applying the ability to use 300 animals in total. We are considering this a way of reducing the amount of animals bread for specific animal experiments by being able to perform preliminary terminal experiments on animals that are set for euthanization.