Ace Therapeutics, as a drug discovery and development partner, can provide our global customers with flexible and customized anxiety animal model services to help researchers successfully achieve their research goals.

Introduction of Specific Phobia Animal Models

Specific phobias are characterized by intense fear or anxiety about a specific object or situation and are usually associated with active avoidance of the feared stimulus. There are currently five main subtypes of specific phobias: animals (e.g., snakes), natural environments (e.g., thunderstorms), blood injection injuries (e.g., needles), situations (e.g., elevators), and others (e.g., situations that may cause vomiting). Individuals with specific phobias frequently report fear of multiple objects or situations. Up to 12.5% of people have experienced a specific phobia at some point in their lives. Animal models that simulate specific phobias are urgently needed, as they are essential for elucidating the neurobiological mechanisms that lead to fear-related behaviors and for creating better treatment options for individuals with phobias.

Fig. 1 Schematic representation of a typical experimental procedure and apparatus for auditory fear conditioning experiments. (Berardi A, et al., 2012)

Animal Modeling Services for Specific Phobia

Ace Therapeutics repeatedly pairs neutral stimuli (conditioned stimuli, usually lights or tones) with unconditioned stimuli (usually foot tremors) to establish Pavlovian fears. Once this association is established, simple presentation of the conditioned stimulus alone is sufficient to elicit typical species-specific fear responses in animals, such as freezing and enhanced startle reflexes, accompanied by changes in physiological parameters, including heart rate, blood pressure, blood pressure, body weight, and stress hormone release. Where the fear-enhanced startle paradigm can be used to individually assess both the specific effects of treatment on learned fear associations (i.e., to assess changes in startle amplitude in light noise trials) and their non-specific effects (e.g., to assess changes in startle amplitude in noise trials alone).

Index

• Cued fear conditioning

When we use the cued fear conditioning paradigm in phobia modeling, two different behavioral metrics are available: freezing and startle magnitude, the latter used to assess the startle effect of fear reinforcement.

• Fear-enhanced startle paradigm

Indications of successful conditioning in the fear-enhanced startle paradigm include the difference between the average startle amplitude observed in the presence of the conditioned stimulus (i.e., light noise trials) and the average startle amplitude measured in the absence of the conditioned stimulus (i.e., noise trials alone).

Information to Be Confirmed

Delivery Standard

Ace Therapeutics is committed to providing animal models of specific phobias to help researchers understand the neural basis of human psychiatric disease pathology and to provide a preclinical evaluation of new therapies. If you are interested in our animal models of specific phobias, please feel free to make an inquiry.

Reference

1. Berardi A, Trezza V, Campolongo C. Modeling specific phobias and posttraumatic stress disorder in rodents: the challenge to convey both cognitive and emotional features. Rev Neurosci. 2012, 23(5-6):645-657.