Refined and accurate tamoxifen administration in mice via encouraged voluntary consumption of palatable formulations
Drug administration in preclinical rodent models is essential for research and the development of novel therapies. Existing compassionate administration methods are mostly incompatible with water-insoluble drugs such as tamoxifen or do not allow for precise timing or dosing of the drugs. For more than two decades, tamoxifen has been administered by oral gavage or injection to CreERT2–loxP gene-modified mouse models to spatiotemporally control gene expression, with the numbers of such inducible models steadily increasing in recent years.
Dominique Vanhecke and colleagues have developed palatable formulations that encourage voluntary consumption of water-insoluble drugs such as tamoxifen without loss of efficacy compared to oral gavage or injections. The sweetened formulations are administered using common micropipettes, allowing for accurate, weight-adjusted dosing that can be performed with minimal training of the experimenter.
This approach offers an accurate and refined alternative administration technique for water-insoluble compounds that can significantly improve animal welfare in drug administration experiments