 Welcome to the first animal research news round-up video of 2023. This January, the FDA in the United States announced that they will no longer require animal tests before drugs move into human trials. This replaces the 1938 provision that potential drugs be tested for safety and efficacy in animals. The new change in law allows the FDA to promote a new drug or treatment to human trials with data gained through animal tests or non-animal methodologies, which are also referred to as NAMS. Whilst the FDA policy change signals a willingness to embrace non-animal testing methods, it is unlikely that it will cause any major reduction in the number of animals used in biomedical testing. Scientists from an organization called EPFL have created a robotic microsurgery platform which is capable of carrying out high precision surgery at micro-scales. The new platform will allow for the dissection of very small areas that are difficult to operate on by hand and will be used to understand how vertebrate animals form during embryonic development. The scientists at EPFL have tested the platform's capabilities by using it to study body access elongation in the zebrafish embryo. In addition to studying embryo development, the new tool will allow for more precise tissue engineering and could even be used to create miniature artificial organs. Next up, two research teams simultaneously reversed signs of aging in mice using the same proteins. In 2012, a Nobel Prize was awarded to the biologist Shinya Yamanaka for the discovery of a protein cocktail capable of reprogramming adult cells into versatile stem cells. A decade later, two separate studies claimed that these proteins can reverse aging for whole organisms, possibly even humans. The first study from a team at Harvard Medical School set out to test the information theory of aging which suggests that human and animals age because of accumulative loss of epigenetic marks, the changes to DNA that alter gene expression. The team claims that the DNA repair mechanisms of cells degrade throughout our lifetime, becoming less and less effective over time. The Harvard team were able to prove their hypothesis by using genetically altered mice to show that health deteriorates following the cutting and repairing of DNA. Within a few weeks, the mice showed classic signs of aging, including hair and pigment loss, signs of frailty, and tissue aging. The second study reported on InScience this month also used Yamanaka's protein cocktail to reverse aging in mice. Researchers injected elderly mice with the proteins and observed an increased lifespan compared to control animals. On average, the mice injected with the protein cocktail lived for another 18 weeks, compared to 9 weeks for the control group. Bypassing the blood-brain barrier to deliver drugs to the brain has always been an obstacle for medical science. But thanks to new research from scientists in Switzerland and Germany, we now know that antibodies can be delivered to the brain through a different path entirely, by traversing long-fibred nerve cells that stretch from the upper nose to the brain. Past research has identified that certain antibodies can heal the brain after a stroke by limiting the activity of a compound called NoGoA that inhibits healing in the brain. However, scientists were struggling to find a way to get the antibodies to the brain, due to the impossible brain blood barrier. Using mice, the Swiss-German team have now shown that it is possible to deliver antibodies to the brain using a nasal spray, and that it improves recovery after a stroke. The new nasal spray method provides a cheap and effective way of delivering antibodies to the brain to heal the damage caused by stroke. That's all from us this month. As always, you can read more about each of these new stories on the UAR website. Links are provided in the caption box below, and don't forget to subscribe for more animal research news stories.