Expertise for high quality design of preclinical studies

The Italian company is located in Northern Italy (Piedmont region) and provides pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device companies and research centres with high quality research and on-time results to prove the efficacy of new drugs in vivo, for the treatment of neurological or psychiatric disorders or biocompatibility of biomedical devices. The company has longstanding, extensive experiences in designing specialized in vivo studies and identifying new and robust models for the preclinical proof of concepts, adapting them to partners' project needs. In details, the company provides the following experimental solutions: - In vivo studies: the company supplies a wide range of functional and psycho-emotional behavioural tests, neurological injury models, brain tumour models, surgical techniques with rodents as well as cardiovascular, endocrine and metabolic measures; - Behavioural studies: psycho-emotional tests, cognitive tests, stereotypic behaviours, explorative behaviour, sociability, stress, daily activities, addiction; - Neurological function studies: reflexes, motor coordination, sedation, ischemia, epilepsy, Huntington disease; - Neonatal and juvenile studies: environmental effects, analysis of developmental milestones; - Functional studies: locomotor activity, spontaneous locomotor activity, feeding behaviour, sexual behaviour, heart rate and blood pressure, oxygen saturation, breathe rate, pulse and breathe distention; - Surgical techniques: traumatic brain Injury, acute and chronic glaucoma models, neuropathic pain, spinal cord lesions, central nervous system and in utero grafting, microsurgery, in utero electroporation, toxic transient focal or global demyelination; - Administration routes: oral routes, parenteral routes, local routes (dermal, ocular, intranasal, intravaginal, buccal, intrarectal), adeno and retroviral injections; - Drug exposure evaluation: bioavailability; - Morphological and biomolecular analyses; - Histological analyses: stereological and morphometric analyses, microscopy; - Cellular and biomolecular analysis: cell cultures, genotyping and protein gene expression; - Experimental models: the company can provide wild type and genetically engineered mouse models for preclinical proof of concept studies; - Genetically modified mouse models: cerebral amyloidosis, familial Alzheimer's disease, cerebellar ataxia, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, spinal muscular atrophy, types A and B Niemann-Pick disease, anxiety, obesity, metabolic syndrome, transgenic mice for visualization of fluorescent neurons and glial cells, mutant lines for cell-type specific conditional and inducible knockout of target genes; - Brain tumour models: in vivo models of glioblastoma (grafts of mouse or human glioblastoma cell lines), RI-based longitudinal analyses, histological investigations, end-point analyses. Available facilities: - Behavioural tests facility offer mazes and infrared camera for behavioural analysis. A computerized video-tracking system (Ethovision XT video track system) is also available; - Neuroanatomy facility offers a confocal microscope, numerous research quality microscopes, an electron microscope and several computer-imaging systems for morphometry, autoradiography quantitative densitometry and image processing; - Neuro-histology facilities offer sliding microtomes, rotary microtomes, vibratomes and cryostats; - Biosafety Level 2 facilities and cellular and molecular biology facilities are also available. The company is looking for technical or research cooperation agreements. Partners sought (pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device companies, Contract Research Organizations (CROs), research centres) should be interested in applying these methods for proof-of-efficacy of new drugs or pilot in vivo studies, or in further developing specific diagnostic tools as a test kit, for new fields of application, by means of technical or research cooperation agreements.