"I believe MDA is a great alternative to oral gavage in many fields. In the field of vaccines, it is a technique that improves welfare and better mimics future use in other animals or humans, making it excellent for improved translatability and optimization of animal use."

Dr. Beatriz Miguelana
Chamorro

ICTYODEV

"Using the MDA approach, we can completely replace oral gavage in the mouse oral glucose tolerance test (oGTT). The oGTT is a commonly used metabolic test in human medicine and preclinical animal research, which assesses how well blood glucose control systems are working in the body and isused to help diagnose diabetes. For our purposes we have adapted the MDA approach using flavoured glucose solution instead of sweetened condensed milk and found that the addition of the flavouring was essential to promote habituation to voluntary glucose drinking. The MDA is much less stressful for both the animals and the investigators. As voluntarily drinking via MDA incorporates glucose sensing by the mouth it is much more similar to the human clinical assay making the approach more translationally relevant. It is our hope that our new approach will become the standard oGTT method for the field and completely replace oral gavage. You can read more about our work in our open access pre-print!"

Prof. Dr. Kate Ellacott

University of Exeter Medical School