Background

Giving a mouse a drug by mouth usually means oral gavage: the animal is held still and a tube is passed down its throat into the stomach. It is quick and the dose is exact, which is why it became standard. It is also stressful, the animals learn to dislike it, and the tube can injure the throat or be misplaced. In a study where an animal is dosed hundreds of times, those costs accumulate.

There is an alternative. With micropipette-guided drug administration (MDA), the drug is mixed into something palatable and offered from a pipette tip, and the mouse drinks it voluntarily. The animal is barely restrained and is doing something it would do anyway, so there is no tube and nothing to injure. Once used to the routine, mice take the dose without difficulty. The stress that gavage causes is itself a variable in an experiment, so removing it can also make results more consistent.

Urs Meyer’s group at the University of Zurich developed and validated the method, and are involved in the Swiss National Research Programme 79, “Advancing 3R”, which underscores their leadership and committment to Refinement methods. However, at the University of Basel, Jean Pieters’s group runs studies in which some animals receive more than 200 oral doses each through oral gavage. Approval from the local veterinary office for a pilot comparing MDA to oral gavage has been obtained.

This grant funded three days in Zurich for two people: Lucile Genty, who will support researchers wishing to adopt the MDA method and act as a local point of contact, and Angelika Offinger, who heads one of the university’s animal facilities and can help drive its wider uptake across the University of Basel.

Aims

• Learn micropipette-guided drug administration directly from the group that developed it.
• Apply it in the Pieters group’s ongoing studies, where animals are dosed repeatedly, and compare it against gavage in the approved pilot.
• Train further researchers within that group.
• Add the method to the University of Basel’s central training programme, so that new researchers learn it as standard.