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Zebrafish and Chips

Please note this event has no step-free access.
Past event - 2018
16 May Doors open 6.30pm
Event 7-10pm
The Zetland Arms, 2 Bute St, Kensington,
London SW7 3EX
Sold Out!
What do synthetic organs and transparent fish have in common? These are cutting-edge techniques aimed at reducing and replacing the use of animals in research. Join us as we team up with Understanding Animal Research and leading scientists from Imperial to hear how Fish and Chips help us tackle disease.

Organ on a chip

Dr Beata Wojciak-Stothard and Alex Ainscough (Principal Investigator and PhD Student)
Have you ever wondered why drug development takes so long and costs so much?
New medicines cost billions and take years to pass regulatory hurdles. The current system often falls short as biological differences between animals and humans means that animal models do not fully reflect human diseases and are not efficient predictors of human disease responses. Organ-on-a-chip devices are an exciting new technology to investigate diseases using human cells that are grown in transparent microchips. This offers an alternative to animal experimentation and has potential to accelerate drug discovery

Fishing for inflammation

Hannah Needham, Madina Wane and Dory Polos (PhD students from the Dallman lab)
Zebrafish develop their immune system at an early embryonic stage and it closely matches that of a human. The immune system plays a key role in driving inflammation, which leads to conditions such as obesity and alzheimer’s. Zebrafish embryos are translucent, have an immune system and can be genetically modified. This allows us to understand how inflammation occurs in a living system using non-invasive techniques, leading to the development of new drugs to fight these conditions.

Suffering for Science: what gives us the right?

John Meredith (Head of outreach and education at Understanding Animal Research)
Modern medical research still depends on animal experiments. Can we really justify inflicting suffering on one species to benefit another in the day and age? John Meredith from Understanding Animal Research will try.