Researchers at the Department of Veterinary Medicine have won a major international award for developing a new way to study respiratory diseases in cattle and other species without having to use live animals.

The Dieter Lütticken Award, worth €20,000, recognises researchers who have made a significant contribution to finding alternatives to animal testing in veterinary sciences.

Dr Dan Tucker and colleagues from the University of Cambridge and the Royal Veterinary College (RVC) won the award for developing an organ culture system based on by-products from abattoirs to study respiratory diseases in livestock.

They found that upper airway tissue could be used in the laboratory to study the infection process of diseases such as Shipping Fever in cattle and to screen potential new vaccines and antibiotics.

Respiratory diseases are a major welfare issue in farm animals and have a significant economic impact, costing the UK cattle industry alone more than £60 million a year. Some farm animal diseases, such as influenza, can also infect humans.

According to Dr Tucker: “Having better tools to study the biology of these diseases opens the door to developing new vaccines to prevent infection and new alternatives to existing antibiotics to control infections once they develop.”

The new model could significantly reduce the number of live animals used in infectious respiratory disease research, he says: “One organ culture experiment using tissues from a single animal can replace up to 60 live animal experiments.”

The new model, developed with funding from the NC3Rs, will be central to the recently announced five-year, £5.6 million multidisciplinary research programme to develop a single vaccine against four major respiratory pathogens of pigs. The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council longer and larger grant (LoLa) grant involves researchers from Imperial College London, the RVC and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, as well as the University of Cambridge.

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