News
15.12.2023The Animal Facilities, a member of the "Plataforma de Biobancos y Biomodelos del Insituto de Salud Carlos III"
The Animal Facilities of the CCiTUB, until now a unit attached to the Animal Models Hub of the "Plataforma de Biobancos y Biomodelos del Insituto de Salud Carlos III", has become an independent unit of the platform through the award of the MAXCARA project: "Modelos Alternativos basados en Xenopus y servicios de CARacterización Avanzada", in the grant call for ISCIII Platform Units supporting R&D&I in Biomedicine and Health Sciences of the Strategic Action in Health 2021-2023.
The funding of this project will reinforce specialized services related to animal models. On the one hand, it will consolidate the offer of existing services, such as cryopreservation and assisted reproduction, and on the other hand, it will expand the offer by incorporating new models and innovative techniques with a significant impact on preclinical research and also aligned with the development and use of alternative methods (replacement, reduction, and refinement). In this sense, the project includes the expansion of the Xenopus service to the Animal Experimentation Unit of Bellvitge, generating the capacity for access to transgenic and/or mutant lines for biomedical research at the national and European levels.
Together with the Advanced Optical Microscopy Unit of the CCiTUB, the project also includes the expansion of advanced characterization services through high-resolution imaging techniques, with the incorporation of features derived from two new unique equipment financed by the AEI infrastructure call: a dual-head (vertical and inverted) multiphoton microscope and an Integrated Molecular and Preclinical Functional Imaging System composed of 4 subsystems - i) Positron Emission Tomography subsystem, PET; ii) Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography subsystem, SPECT; iii) X-ray Computed Tomography subsystem, CT; and iv) Fluorescent and Luminescent Imaging Acquisition subsystem, OI.
All these techniques allow the analysis of tissues and organs that reproduce various pathologies and diseases, enabling molecular and cellular characterization, as well as the evaluation of the response to therapeutic treatments.