Funding awarded to develop alternative to animal testing for cattle vaccines Dr. Rachel Tanner pursues organoid-based vaccine screening tools for cattle4 November 2024 4 November 2024 2 minute read 2 minute read By: By: University of Oxford EuropeDr. Rachel Tanner, University of OxfordThe National Centre for the Replacement, Refinement, and Reduction of Animals in Research has awarded a £545,105 grant to Dr. Rachel Tanner to develop a method of screening cattle vaccines without the use of animal testing. Cattle are affected by a range of diseases in the UK and worldwide, including bovine TB and foot and mouth disease. The new project will enable a novel tool for screening bovine vaccines, replacing the use of cattle (and rodents) in early vaccine development and vaccine batch-testing. Finally, they will implement the process to screen potential bovine TB vaccines, disseminate the method to ensure relevant end-user laboratories can use it, and generate a small-scale bovine lymphoid tissue bank. As well as replacing animal testing and alleviating animal welfare issues, it will enable the acceleration of bovine vaccine development – whilst making it more cost-effective and transferable to resource-limited settings.