Charles River licenses rodent model for global diabetes reserach

14-Mar-2019 - Last updated on 14-Mar-2019 at 16:43 GMT

(Image: Getty/ Olena Kurashova)

Charles River Labs enters a licensing agreement with Crown Bioscience to expand access to the latter’s diabetic rat model.

Per the agreement, Charles River will gain exclusive license to create and distribute Crown Biosciences’ Zucker Diabetic Sprague-Dawley (ZDSD) a translatable rodent model of metabolic syndrome, obesity, dyslipidemia, and diabetes.

Charles River will source the ZDSD models to its global services platforms and expects the commercial distribution of the model to begin by mid-summer 2019.

The model was created with a polygenic background and an intact passageway of leptin to mimic the development of the human disease.

According to Crown Bio, the model does not use monogenic mutations of leptin or the leptin receptor of the development of obesity and Type 2 diabetes, which are often how models of this type are created.

The rat was instead developed by selectively crossing the same strain for the traits of obesity and diabetes to become a model of diabetic neuropathy.

Charles River executive vice president of global research models and services Colin Dunn PhD said in a statement that working to expand this translatable model to study will have a “significant impact globally” as metabolic diseases become more common.

Financial details of the agreement were not disclosed.