Animal models have greatly improved our understanding of human diseases and have been a useful tool for discovering targets for therapeutic drugs. As the drug discovery process shifts toward specifically targeting pathways and molecules, the importance of animal model systems continue to increase. Nevertheless, although promising results with certain preclinical treatments have achieved with animal models, the same treatments do not always translate to human clinical trials. Less than 20% of drugs entering clinical trials in humans are eventually found safe and effective for new drug approval. As a result, many diseases are still incurable and the improvement of preclinical animal research is definitely required.

Most available animal models are made in mice because their genomes are similar to that of humans, their availability, eases of handling, high reproductive rates, the relatively low cost of use, and probably the most practical reason – the well-established technologies for mice genome manipulation.

In contrast, although rats have long been a model favored by physiologists, pharmacologists, and neuroscientists that rats have many advantages over mouse models especially in toxicology and pharmacology studies.  However, the inability of rat embryonic stem (ES) cells utilization has severely li

NLAC has now successfully generated GM mice and rats with CRISPR/Cas system.  Being one of few teams of the world that is capable of routinely performing rat pronuclear microinjection, NLAC combines rat manipulating platform and CRISPR/Cas technique to generate GM rats. At present NLAC has produced gene-knock out rats disease models such as hyperlipidemia, hyperglycemia and me