The 3Rs refer to “Reduction, Refinement, and Replacement” for the use of animals in scientific research. The Pawlowic lab takes our efforts to incorporate the 3Rs very seriously. Animal welfare is key to us as a group, and also at an individual level.
Recently, our team worked in collaboration with the staff technicians at the University of Dundee and were recognised for our efforts to refine our work. Specifically the group was awarded 2025 Refinement Prize awarded by the European Partnership for Alternatives Approaches to Animal Testing (EPAA).
Specifically, the prize recognises a team that has demonstrated outstanding achievements in new, novel approaches to advance the implementation and/or awareness raising of refinement of animal testing.
A member of our group was invited to present our project and accept the award at the 20th Anniversary Conference of the EPAA in Brussels, Belgium. The lab watched live from Dundee! It was clear that the work was very well received by the members of the EPAA. Since, we have been asked to give additional presentations about our work on the 3Rs to another academic group.
Grant MJ Hall is an MRC student co-supervised with Prof Susan Wyllie to continue our collaborative work to develop Mode-of-Action technologies and insight for Cryptosporidium. On Friday November 7th, Grant gave a seminar on his PhD project and then had a successful viva. Congrats for several years of hard work and for presenting and defending your thesis so well. We are so very proud of you!
Special thanks to Prof Rita Tewari for serving as External Examiner and Prof Marcus Lee as Internal Examiner, and Prof David Horn for acting as convenor.
Left to Right: Prof Rita Tewari, Prof Susan Wyllie, Dr. Grant MJ Hall, Prof Marcus Lee, Dr Mattie Christien Pawlowic
Grant’s hat, showcasing memories for 4 years… and also a thank-you slide dedicated to Watson.
Our lab PhD alumni came back (Ross, Emma, and Jack) and as the second mode-of-action focussed PhD student a brief “sorting hat” ceremony was performed 🙂
We also celebrated with a Guinness Chocolate cake, a shared favorite of both Mattie and Grant’s of the new local restaurant, East Field, on Perth Road. This time courtesy of Mattie (recipe from Nigella).
During the summer of 2024 we posted an article to biorxiv about the function of Cryptosporidium Oocyst Wall Proteins (COWPs) in Cryptosporidium transmission. We are excited to share this week that it has now been peer-reviewed and published at PLoS Pathogens!
Congrats to all the authors, but especially Dr. Ross Bacchetti who performed a lot of this work during his PhD in the lab. Also special thanks to Sarah Stevens, current PhD student for continuing the work and helping it get to publication.
This is a major output of the lab’s Sir Henry Dale Fellowship (Royal Society and the Wellcome Trust), and provided key preliminary data for our new Career Development Award (Wellcome Trust). Thanks to Susan Wyllie, David Horn, Marcus Lee and his lab, and the peer reviewers for their feedback on the early versions of the manuscript.
In this publication we confirm that the COWPs are true oocyst wall proteins, identify the first markers of the oocyst wall suture, and characterise oocysts that lack COWP8. This sets a foundation of experimental approaches to study oocyst wall formation and function in our current grant.
We look forward to celebration with as many co-authors as possible soon 🙂
Left to Right: Lee, Mattie, Sarah, Peyton, Grant (thanks to Mukul Rawat for taking the photo!)
Dr. Mattie Christine Pawlowic is a Principal Investigator and Sir Henry Dale Fellow. Her group is a member of the Wellcome Centre for Anti-Infectives Research at the University of Dundee. She established her independent research group in 2017 funded primarily by a Sir Henry Dale Fellowship from the Wellcome Trust and The Royal Society (£1.5 million; 2019-2025).
Thanks to a Career Development Award (CDA) from the Wellcome Trust, Mattie’s lab has been awarded £3.08 million to fund the lab for the next 8 years! This funding will commence in May, 2025. These awards are incredibly competitive, with only one other group from the University of Dundee successfully being awarded this type of research grant since CDAs were established.
You can read about the project on the Wellcome Trust’s website HERE, the University of Dundee press release HERE and the story on the WCAIR website HERE. You can read about our work more generally in the UoD Alumni magazine, “The Bridge” HERE. You can watch Mattie give a recent seminar where she describes how previous research in the lab has lead to this new project below:
An artist’s rendering of Cryptosporidium parasites (yellow) hatching out of their shell (orange). Credit Harry Duncan
Dr. Pawlowic’s lab studies Cryptosporidium, a parasite that infects the guts and causes severe diarrheal disease. The symptoms are severe and lead to impressive weight loss (often >15 pounds in < 2 weeks) and dangerous dehydration. Infection with this parasite is especially deadly for young, malnourished children. It is estimated that up to 200,000 children under the age of 2 around the world die annually from this disease.
Cryptosporidiosis can likewise be fatal for people who are immunocompromised (under immune suppression therapy for cancer treatment or an organ transplant, or a disease that affects the immune system like AIDS). People with intact immune systems also get sick, and it can require hospitalisation, but eventually their immune system can control the infection. There is currently no vaccine and no effective treatment for cryptosporidiosis.
Cryptosporidium is a waterborne pathogen that is transmitted inside a microscopic shell-like structure called an oocyst. The parasite is most often spread through contaminated water. This includes outbreaks in municipal water supplies and swimming pools. This is because Cryptosporidium is amazingly resistant to common water treatments, notably chlorination. Once ingested, parasites “hatch” from the oocyst and infect the intestine, causing diarrhoeal disease.
Hatching out of their eggshell is a critical bottleneck in parasite transmission. New tools the Pawlowic created allow us to investigate the biology of hatching and open this area for exploration. We recently identified proteins that are located at the zipper-like opening on the oocyst shell (Bacchetti et al biorxiv, see publication page). We will use genetics, biochemistry, and microscopy to understand how Cryptosporidium build the protective shell and zipper opening, and hatch at the perfect time. Using microscopic biomechanical techniques, with collaborators Aurelien Dumetre and colleagues in France (Lab Adhesion and Inflammation) will understand why oocysts are so resilient. These insights have the potential to help us understand how to interrupt infection and stop parasite transmission.
You see a short video of Mattie explaining some of our research questions below. Thanks to Nicola Caldwell, lead :
"It's really important to learn more about this parasite because it affects both ourselves and agriculture."@goldenpipette and researchers from @dundeeuni launched a study to discover more about the parasite cryptosporidium that cannot be killed by household cleaning products. pic.twitter.com/FQA7sugOEs
During Career Development Award, the awardee will develop their research capabilities, drive innovative programmes of work and deliver significant shifts in understanding related to human life, health and wellbeing.
To be competitive, your research proposal will be:
Bold. It aims to deliver a significant shift in understanding and/or it provides a significant advance over existing methodologies, conceptual frameworks, tools or techniques. It has the potential to stimulate new and innovative research.
Creative. Your proposed approach is novel – it develops and tests new concepts, methods or technologies, or combines existing ideas and approaches in a new way.
High quality. It is well-designed, clear, supported by evidence and the proposed outcomes/outputs are feasible.
Although Mattie wrote the application and interviewed in front of an interview panel at the Wellcome Trust, current and previous lab members made pivotal contributions to the application and my preparation. Thank you all for your support over the last 8 months during the process.
Mattie would also like to thank her mom and her son Clark.
Mattie Christine Pawlowic Lab 