We are honoured and excited to announce that the Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research of Austria (BMBWF) and the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) have funded our project, “Alternative methods for tick rearing and infection models” (https://doi.org/10.55776/PAT8439224), which focuses on the replacement, reduction and refinement (3Rs) of laboratory animals in studies related to ticks and tick-borne diseases.
Ticks rely solely on blood as their nutriment during their life. While feeding on an animal, ticks can get infected with a tick-borne pathogen that can cause disease in humans and animals. To study the transmission cycles of pathogens between ticks and vertebrates, researchers primarily rely on laboratory animals. The animals are used to feed the ticks or study the infection dynamics by either infecting the ticks or becoming infected by ticks feeding on them. The project focuses on the optimisation of an artificial feeding system based on silicone membranes. This system has been used for years but has not replaced laboratory animals due to inconsistent feeding success in ticks. Also, the feeding system relies on animal blood, but we hypothesise that by creating a nutrient-rich alternative medium, we can reduce the need for blood and laboratory animals. Additionally, this standardised substrate could be easily adopted by other researchers for their purposes. Lastly, we aim to use this system to artificially infect ticks, enabling controlled studies to further research tick-borne disease prevention.