Innovation Grant Winners 2022

Congratulations to our 2022 Innovation Grant winners!

We received many diverse and fascinating applications this year, and our Science Advisory Panel had the tricky job of reviewing which were the most innovative, interesting, and most likely to advance the replacement of animal research in line with FRAME’s mission.

After much deliberation, a total of £29000 has been awarded to the three following projects:

Dr Hannah Harrison at the University of Manchester

Hannah's team will be developing a novel in vitro system to see how metastatic breast cancer spreads around the body. They've found a way of sampling of signals sent to and from two populations of cells: they're using an aggressive and invasive breast cancer cell line as the primary tumour and normal human lung cells as a secondary site. If it's possible to identify the signals, in future, they may be able to block them, reduce cancer spread and improve patient outcomes.

Dr Janine Coombes at Robert Gordon University

Janine and her colleagues are developing a novel 3D in vitro model of the human intestine and its immune cells. Maintaining our gut requires an intricate 'conversation' between immune cells, epithelial cells lining the intestine, our diet, and our 'good' bacteria. Any miscommunication can result in Inflammatory Bowel Disease, such as Crohn’s or ulcerative colitis. Janine's team will generate intestinal "organoids" from human stem cells and "gut-like" immune cells from cell lines to build a system to study how inflammation, diet, microbes, and drugs, influence immune responses in the gut.

Dr Farideh Javid at the University of Huddersfield

Farideh's team are developing 3D models of ovarian cancer to replace animals in drug development. We already know that 3D in vitro models of human cancer more closely resemble the disease in humans, but recent approaches have used material derived from animals which can limit how they translate to a human tumour 'micro-environment'. Farideh will be creating an animal-free ovarian cancer model, testing it on known anti-cancer drugs, and comparing it to published human data.

It’s down to our amazing supporters that we can fund such incredible research.

Thank you to everyone who has supported our work with a donation. If you would like to give to FRAME you can do so using the donate button below.

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