Preclinical Research Tool Innovation in Resource-scarce Setting – A Case Study of a Mouse Anxiety Multi-test Appararus

One of the factors responsible for the high prevalence and attendant socio-economic burden of anxiety disorders is the paucity and slow pace of discovery of new anxiolytic drugs to complement or replace the existing ones due to high attrition rates and poor translation of preclinical anxiolytic drug discovery efforts to clinical usage. This scenario is viewed to arise from certain factors including the inherent anxiety sensitivity idiosyncrasies of most used individual classical anxiety tests/models when used as single assays. This thrust of this study is to invent a mouse multi-test that will be devoid of this limitation. Previous attempts to overcome this limitation by testing and retesting experimental mice on multiple individual paradigms on different times were soon encumbered by one-trial tolerance phenomenon on subsequent trials. Although a multi-test apparatus invented by Ramos comprising a light-dark, plus-, and open-field mazes is largely devoid of the limitations observed with single anxiety apparatuses, the central area of the elevated plus maze in the middle of the triple test still retains some ambiguity and errors in the behavioural thus generated. A novel mouse anxiety multi-test device comprising light-dark maze, zero-maze, and marble-burying mazes, dubbed U. of A. Mouse Anxiety Multi-test, that would be devoid of the limitations of the existing mouse single and multi- anxiety tests on one hand, and would potentially exhibit greater and richer sensitivity to anxiety-related behaviours in the mouse, was conceptualised. The fabrication of this composite anxiety test tool was made from locally sourced materials using simple tools requiring minimal space. The new mouse anxiety triple so generated is cost-effective – costing about 4 percent of the worth of its foreign counterparts. It is environmentally safe, portable, and operationally simple. Initial behavioural assessment of the tool indicate it can generate state anxiety in mice. This innovation is a potential asset to preclinical research in anxiolytic drug discovery. However, there is the need for its further pharmacological evaluation and automation.