Launched in 2014, the Provost’s Awards for excellence in animal research acknowledged staff who have made advances in the 3Rs, shown openness or demonstrated a long-term commitment to improving research practice. Winners receive £1,000 to cover costs of presenting their work to a wider audience.
Winners of the previous editions can be found in the yearly Annual Reports.
Award winners for 2022
Application of the 3Rs, researchers - joint - Ms Claire Dunican, PhD student and Dr Athina Georgiadou, research fellow
Ms Dunican and Dr Georgiadou receive the Provost’s Award for using rational approaches to choose mouse models of malaria. Many combinations of mouse strains and malaria parasites are used in the malaria research field. Until now, the rationale for selecting one model over another to study disease mechanisms relied on subjective parameters. Using comparative transcriptomics, Ms Dunican and Dr Georgiadou defined how closely mouse models recapitulate the biological processes occurring in different severe malaria syndromes, providing a rationale for selecting the most relevant models. Their approach can dramatically reduce the number of mice used in experiments that have no relevance to human disease.
Application of the 3Rs, researchers - joint - Dr Masanori Asai, NC3Rs training fellow
Dr Asai received the Provost’s Award for his work reducing the number of animals used in tuberculosis (TB) research. Dr Asai has pioneered a novel mycobacterial infection model using Galleria mellonella (Greater wax moth) as an animal model. Dr Asai completed a proteomic and gene expression analysis of the G. mellonella-TB model, a first of its kind, showing that the infection model recapitulates all the hallmarks of mycobacterial disease. Pre-screening in G. mellonella can reduce animal use in the TB research field by 70%.
Public Engagment award - Mrs Rebecca Frise, laboratory manager
Mrs Frise receives the Provost’s Award for volunteering as a speaker for the 2021 Institute of Animal Technology (IAT) webinar series to educate the public about the use of animals in research. Mrs Frise delivered an extremely informative talk and had several helpful interactions with public audiences. She also participated in an external event - how animal research has helped unlock Covid19 research- answering follow-up questions about animal research’s role in biomedical discovery.