Gut Archives | Replacing Animal Research

The Problem

Did you know, over half a million people in the UK have an inflammatory bowel disease, like Crohn’s disease? People with these conditions can endure debilitating symptoms like severe stomach pain, diarrhoea, and unplanned weight loss. It can significantly impact a person’s daily life and well-being.

Chronic inflammation in the gut occurs because the immune system isn’t working quite how it should. A healthy gut absorbs nutrients from our food, but chronic inflammation makes it difficult for the gut to do its job.

The gut’s immune system is like a security team that needs to know the difference between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ microbes. The good microbes help us digest food while the bad ones can make us sick. Normally, the cells of the security system talk to each other and the gut lining to keep things running smoothly. Sometimes though, things go wrong.

By learning more about how this communication works we could unlock new ways to treat, and prevent, inflammatory bowel disease. This would drastically improve the lives of millions of people worldwide.

The problem is everyone’s gut microbes are a little bit different, and the way our immune systems respond to them varies too. This is a new area of science which often relies on animals for research. In this narrow research field alone, Dr Coombes estimates nearly 9,000 mice are used every year.

The Project

There’s currently no accepted method for growing gut immune cells in the lab. Since they’re different from immune cells elsewhere in the body, this has been a significant hurdle in chronic inflammation research. It’s also why researchers continue to rely on animals.

Our grant is helping Dr Coombe’s team explore a new approach that allows them to grow these specific gut immune cells. Using them and human stem cells, they’re growing tiny replicas of human intestines in a dish. This is known as an organoid, a miniature version of an organ that can replicate its key functions, which researchers can use to study the human body more accurately.

With these organoids, they can study how different things like inflammation, food, and medicines affect the immune system’s response in the gut. Imagine being able to directly study how certain foods trigger an immune reaction or how certain medicines interact with the gut’s defence system without using animals.

This will offer us a much more realistic model than animals and could help replace them entirely.

The Potential

This new model will be a powerful tool to understand the messages immune cells send to the gut lining and vice versa. It will help us understand how to better treat, and even prevent, devastating conditions like Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis.

This research holds immense promise for improving the lives of millions of people across the globe and for revolutionising the way we study gut health.
It will support the replacement of thousands of live animals and animal-derived products in this research field.

In the future, it could go even further and help develop new drugs, with fewer side effects, without the use of animals.

Developing a 3D in vitro model of human intestine and its immune cells

Dr Janine Coombes

The Problem

The Project

The Potential

Dr Coombes estimates nearly 9,000 mice are used every year in this research field.

Our funded projects

A human organ platform to replace animal models in gene therapy testing

Testing nanoparticle safety without animals: a new lab-grown lung model

Developing a realistic animal-free chronic wound infection model