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This is an HTML version of an attachment to the Freedom of Information request 'Animal testing funded by cosmetics companies'.
 
 
 
 
 
24 February 2008 
 
File ref: T/3/7/101 
 
 
Dr Geraint Bevan 
Email: request-6719-
[email address] 
 
 
 
Dear Dr Bevan  
 
Thank you for your email dated 26 January 2009, in which you asked for 
details of research involving animal testing undertaken at the University of 
Edinburgh, funded wholly or in part by cosmetics companies for each year 
since 1997. I am pleased to provide the following information in response to 
your request. 
 
We have identified one research project which is partly funded by a cosmetic 
company. The current project licence covering this work was awarded in 
August 2005. The aims and benefits associated with the project can be found 
in the attached document entitled ‘Cosmetic Company Funded Research – 
Project Details’.  
 
Copyright in the information you have been given belongs to the University of 
Edinburgh or to another party.  Copyright material must not be copied, 
distributed, modified, reproduced, transmitted, published (including published 
on the Internet or an intranet), or otherwise made available in whole or in part 
without the prior written consent of the copyright holder. 
 
Yours sincerely 
 
Cosmetic Company Funded Research - February 2009 
 
 
Funding details: In July 2008 the researcher won a “fellowship for women in science” which 
was joint funded by L’Oreal and United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural 
Organization (UNESCO) and also involved the Royal Institution of Great Britain and the UK 
Resource Centre for Women in Science, Engineering and Technology. This fellowship has 
provided modest funds for the researcher’s work on malaria parasites. 
 
Research aims:  Malaria parasites cause some of the most serious infectious diseases of 
humans, our livestock, companion animals and wildlife. There is a great deal of research into 
the genetics, cell and molecular biology, and immunology of malaria parasites but despite this 
effort, malaria parasites remain a step ahead of medical science. The researcher’s work takes 
a broader view and considers how these parasites have evolved sophisticated strategies to 
maximise their ability to infect mosquito vectors, which they must do to be able to be 
transmitted to new hosts (infections). For example, malaria parasites have both an asexual- 
and sexual phase. The asexual phase is responsible for causing the symptoms of disease, 
but the sexual phase is responsible for transmitting parasites to mosquitoes. A large part of 
the researcher’s work is motivated by the need to understand the sex and social lives of 
parasites to help develop medical interventions to target them. Recently it has been 
discovered that, after mating, some parasites undergo apoptosis (a form of programmed-cell-
suicide) inside mosquitoes, rather than infecting them. This seems to contradict ‘Darwinian 
survival of the fittest’ as parasites are expected to evolve strategies to maximise their 
proliferation not their death. The fellowship for women in science allows the researcher to 
harness recently developed experimental techniques to investigate why parasites have 
evolved to undergo apoptosis.  
 
Expected benefits: Harnessing this suicide-like behaviour in parasites could offer a new 
paradigm to treat infectious disease – and could apply to parasites that cause leishmaniasis 
and sleeping sickness too – but requires an understanding of the evolution, physiology, and 
genetics of this behaviour first. More generally, there is an increasing demand to be able to 
use evolutionary principles to evaluate the likely short- and long-term success of medical 
inventions. However, the success of this endeavor hinges on understanding whether the 
basic biology of parasites can be explained by evolutionary theories.  
 

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