Launch of The Lord Dowding Fund fMRI Scanner at Aston paves the way for non anim

[Guest guest]

6 September 2006

 

 

The Lord Dowding Fund (LDF)'s successful launch this week of a world

class, high-technology medical facility at the Aston University MRI

Research Centre, was attended by the Lord Mayor of Birmingham,

Councillor Mike Sharpe.

 

The new facility is acknowledged to be a milestone not only in terms

of technology – as the most powerful of its kind in the UK - but also

in terms of replacing the use of animals in research as it

facilitates the latest human-based scientific analysis of the brain.

 

Tim Phillips, Campaign Director of the LDF, the research funding arm

of Animal Defenders International (ADI) and National Anti-Vivisection

Society (NAVS), said: " We are committed to paying the £80,000 per

annum running costs of the functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging

(fMRI) scanning facility until the end of the decade. The move

follows LDF support for a number of important research projects at

the University including pain research and neuro-toxicity. As the new

fMRI scanner is twice as powerful as those found in hospitals, it

allows incredibly sensitive study of the human brain. Animal

researchers are increasing pressure to study neurological disorders

in primates, yet this facility shows it is possible to non-invasively

study people. Importantly, the research that we are funding is on

people, so there are not the potentially catastrophic risks of trying

to extrapolate from one species to another. "

 

Professor Paul Furlong of Aston University, added: " The World Health

Organisation estimates the numbers affected by mental and

neurological disorders will surge over the next 20 years and will be

the second most common cause of death and disability by 2020. The

integration of functional brain imaging and pharmacokinetics,

together with neuropsychological assessment methods, provide potent

and novel tools for the study of mental health. Validation of these

techniques will inevitably lead to a reduction of animal experiments

and ultimately replacement of animals for the study of human

cognitive health. "

 

Aston was the first site in the UK to marry both MEG (employing the

UK's only whole-head Magnetoencephalography system) and fMRI research

facilities, putting the Academy of Life Sciences at the very

forefront of world scientific endeavor. The opening on the 4th will

mark a huge step forward in the understanding of the human brain and

show the way forward and away from animal experimentation.

 

LDF Neuroscience Facility at Aston University

The Lord Dowding Fund Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)

facility at Aston

University is now open and fully operational. Until the end of the

decade LDF has committed to provide the full running costs for the

facility in the new Aston Academy of Life Sciences, which carries out

no animal experiments whatsoever.

 

fMRI enables visualisation of brain cortex function in response to

physical tasks, by detecting an increased flow of oxygenated blood in

areas of nerve activity. The grant will cover the full running costs

for the new Siemens Trio 3-tesla MRI system, which is housed at the

facility. This system is highly sensitive to changes in blood oxygen,

and it is at least twice as powerful as

fMRI scanners used in hospitals.

 

fMRI can be combined with MEG scanning to increase understanding of

the human brain by enabling researchers to clearly track, in human

volunteers, not just which areas of the brain are active, but when.

Such techniques provide information of direct relevance to human

health whereas information from human or other animal experiments may

simply be of no relevance to the human situation.