Understanding Animal Research aims to achieve understanding and acceptance of the need for humane animal research in the UK. Includes news, together with information about animal research.
Mice, rabbits, frogs and sheep – each took their turn in the development of pregnancy tests. You want to know if you are pregnant or not? Easy, right? Just buy a cheap and reliable kit from the chemist or supermarket and get an instant answer from a quick urine test in the comfort of your own home. But it wasn’t always so easy. In fact, the creation of the reliable pregnancy tests that benefit so many women, and that now cost just a few pounds, was a scientific battle that was only won thanks to a great deal of animal research and the determination of one extraordinary women. http://www.understandinganimalresearch.org.uk/news/research-medical-benefits/animal-research-and-pregnancy-testing-a-history/
Learn about the behaviour of rats and how they are cared for in UK laboratories in our new video for World Rat Day. Look around Manchester lab here: https://www.manchester.ac.uk/medialibrary/degreeprogrammes/animal-unit-tour/#node6 More info here: http://www.understandinganimalresearch.org.uk/news/research-medical-benefits/10-years-of-rat-research-how-stroke-studies-have-evolved/ https://nc3rs.org.uk/news/tickling-rats-social-enrichment-improve-rodent-welfare http://www.understandinganimalresearch.org.uk/animals/10-facts/rat/
Spiders, scorpions and other venomous animals are 'milked' for their venom which is then used in medical research. These animal were filmed at Venomtech, a specialist venom supplier (https://venomtech.co.uk). Find out more about venom derived drugs here: http://www.animalresearch.info/en/drug-development/venom-derived-drugs/
Professor Dame Nancy Rothwell, President and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Manchester gave the 2019 Paget Lecture. She presented her ground breaking work on stroke and the role of inflammation in brain damage, that has recently translated into clinical trials. The Stephen Paget Memorial Lecture is a scientific lecture that commemorates the life of Dr Stephen Paget. Stephen Paget (1855 – 1926) was the founder of the Research Defence Society, a forerunner of Understanding Animal Research. As a medical doctor, he believed passionately that better science and understanding of physiology would lead to better medical treatments. After his death in 1926, he was greatly missed by his colleagues and by the scientific community. The first Stephen Paget memorial lecture was given in 1927 to commemorate his life and allow leading bio-medical scientists of the day to talk about their research. You can read and see nearly a hundred years of these lectures on Animal Research Information here: http://www.animalresearch.info/en/medical-advances/articles-lectures/
Extracts from venoms provide a rich source of potential drugs http://www.understandinganimalresearch.org.uk/news/research-medical-benefits/drug-discovery-with-venom/
Researchers have found that laboratory mice moved by tail handling rather than by tunnel are less responsive to reward which has implications for designing and interpreting scientific studies. Here is the original research https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-20716-3 and here is the original press release https://www.ncl.ac.uk/press/articles/archive/2018/02/mousehandling/ Today the UK government releases its statistics listing the tapes of animals used in research and the types of work (procedures) done with them. http://www.understandinganimalresearch.org.uk/news/communications-media/animal-research-numbers-in-2018/
Vet Nicolas Granger describes how cell grown olfactory cells are being used in spinal repair in dogs.
Professor Clive Page, Kings College London, gave the 81st Stephen Paget memorial lecture in 2017 on the subject: How animals have contributed to our understanding and treatment of respiratory diseases
Mice are moved into a clean cage every week or so in MRC Harwell. This is one of 60 films to be found in 360 lab tours of four UK research facilities: MRC Harwell Institute, The Pirbright Institute, a surgical facility at the University of Bristol and the primate facility at Oxford University - see them at http://labanimaltour.org
At MRC Harwell mice can be genetically modified. One method is to inject RNA into the early stage embryo. This is one of 60 films to be found in 360 lab tours of four UK research facilities: MRC Harwell Institute, The Pirbright Institute, a surgical facility at the University of Bristol and the primate facility at Oxford University - see them at http://labanimaltour.org
Dr Daan van der Veen is a lecturer in sleep and chronobiology at Surrey University. He has worked with voles (Microtus arvalis) because these animals naturally live in a fast, ultradian rhythm. They feed and socialise for a few hours and then sleep for an hour or so before repeating this cycle three or four times a day. The animals are kept in deep litter so they can burrow,and provided with an exercise wheel in each cage to allow them to use up their restless energy. In chronobiology, an ultradian rhythm is a recurrent period or cycle repeated throughout a 24-hour day. In contrast, circadian rhythms complete one cycle daily, while infradian rhythms such as the human menstrual cycle have periods longer than a day. The Oxford English Dictionary's definition of Ultradian specifies that it refers to cycles with a period shorter than a day but longer than an hour. The descriptive term ultradian is used in sleep research in reference to the 90–120 minute cycling of the sleep stages during human sleep. Some references to learn more: http://www.pnas.org/content/103/9/3393.abstract http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.3109/07420528.2011.591953 http://www.fasebj.org/content/31/2/743.long And more generally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultradian_rhythm
With over 20,000 mice, robots are used to clean and load the cages. See a 360 tour of the facility at www.labanimaltour.org
A senior technician at The Pirbright Institute explains how pigs are looked after and trained while being used to test a new vaccine against African Swine Fever virus - a deadly disease of pigs and wild boar that has just arrived on the eastern edge of Europe. See more at www.labanimaltour.org
Professor Sir Mark Walport presented the 80th Stephen Paget Memorial Lecture (2016) for Understanding Animal Research
Third Openness Awards in Animal Research: Internal or Sector Engagement Award was presented to the Institute of Animal Technology for the development of their Careers Pathway. The Public Engagement Activity Award was presented to the Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute for their museum event engaging public audiences with cancer research. The winner of the Media Engagement Award was the University of Leicester for its work with The Sun, which visited the University’s animal facilities to cover a story about how animals are used in obesity research. The website award was given to Manchester University. UAR’s Individual Award for Outstanding Contribution to Openness in Animal Research was presented to Andy Gay. http://www.understandinganimalresearch.org.uk/news/communications-media/openness-awards-2016-and-the-80th-stephen-paget-memorial-lecture/
Ferrets catch the flu and exhibit similar symptoms to us so they are used in research to make flu vaccines and to better understand why this disease is so good at making us ill. Here Professor Wendy Barclay of Imperial College London explains their role in her research. The ferrets we see are used to train scientists in how to handle the animals. We could not film the research ferrets because we might have given them a cold!Read more about Ferrets and Flu on our sister website, Animal Research Information: the general role of ferrets in research is discussed here: http://www.animalresearch.info/en/designing-research/research-animals/ferret/and more information about the influenza virus can be read here: http://www.animalresearch.info/en/medical-advances/diseases-research/influenza/ while the latest advances are recorded here: http://www.animalresearch.info/en/medical-advances/research-the-news/influenza/.
Professor Françoise Barré-Sinoussi was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2008 for the discovery of the HIV - the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS. In this interview she describes the importance of using animals in her research to understand the disease. In French with English sub-titles
Interview with Professor Matthew Fisher (Imperial University, London) about his research on the fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis that causes the often lethal disease, Chytridiomycosis in amphibians. UAR interviewed Prof Matthew Fisher of Imperial University London about his work on the fungus, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd) currently devastating amphibian species around the world. Matthew and his team have been the first to successfully treat infected frogs and their tadpoles. They 'cured' individual midwife toads (Alytes obstetricans) with a dilute solution of a fungicide Itraconazole and after cleaning their habitat in the mountains of Majorca were able to re-introduce the species where they had previously become locally extinct. This is the first time amphibians have been successfully re-introduced following an outbreak of Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis. While this method is not an answer to removing the fungus from the wider environment it does make it possible for people to remove threatened species into captivity and maintain them in 'arks' until their descendants can be returned to the wild. Read more here: http://www.britannica.com/topic/Bd-The-Amphibian-Plague-2037002 Download a transcript of the interview here. References Bosch J, Sanchez-Tomé E, Fernández-Loras A, Oliver JA, Fisher MC, Garner TWJ. (2015) Successful elimination of a lethal wildlife infectious disease in nature. Biology Letters. DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2015.0874 Fisher MC, Henk DA, Briggs C, Brownstein JS, Madoff L, McCraw SL, Gurr S. (2012) Emerging fungal threats to animal, plant and ecosystem health. Nature 484: 186-194
Professor Colin Blakemore tells four stories about the brain in this 2015 Paget lecture. Colin discussed the importance of animal work, the 3Rs and continual development of experimental design in four different aspect of neuroscience: the cerebral cortex, language, Huntington’s Disease and Stroke. He concluded the lecture by discussing the importance of avoiding a polarised debate about animal research.Stephen Paget founded the Research Defence Society the precursor to Understanding Animal Research, in 1908. The full transcript of this lecture is available here: http://www.understandinganimalresearch.org.uk/download_file/2019/174/Previous Paget lectures are available here: http://www.animalresearch.info/en/medical-advances/articles-lectures/This video can be downloaded here: https://vimeo.com/151118322
Animation produced for the politics.co.uk website to provide an overview briefing about animal research in the UK.
Read a history of pacemakers here: http://www.understandinganimalresearch.org.uk/news/communications-media/top-ten-medical-inventions-pacemakers/
We've edited down a film made in 1961 about the first mass vaccination campaign against polio in the UK. You can see the original here: http://wellcomelibrary.org/player/b19861138 Our blog about the anniversary is here: http://www.understandinganimalresearch.org.uk/news/communications-media/sixty-years-of-the-polio-miracle-vaccine/
Professor Dame Linda Partridge, director of the UCL Institute of Healthy Ageing, delivered a fascinating lecture on “The Science of Healthy Ageing”. Recent work has shown that ageing is malleable to genetic, dietary and pharmacological intervention. She described work in her own laboratory to create an inducible model of Alzheimer’s disease using fruit flies, which shows very similar pathology to the human condition. These findings have opened the way to discovering drugs capable of producing a broad-spectrum improvement in the health of older people. The 78th Stephen Paget Memorial Lecture was given at the Wellcome Collection in London in December. The Lecture was established in 1927 following the death of Stephen Paget, founder of UAR forerunner, the Research Defence Society. Past Paget Lecturers have included Nobel Laureates Sir Howard Florey and Sir Peter Medawar, and renowned evolutionary biologist and science writer Professor Steve Jones. The inaugural Understanding Animal Research Openness Awards for animal research were given immediately preceding the lecture.
Understanding Animal Research launched the Openness Awards, an annual presentation to celebrate the achievements of the sector in honouring their commitment to the Concordat on Openness on Animal Research. Since the launch in May 2014 the Concordat has brought together 85 UK organisations involved in animal research in a pledge to be more open and transparent about their use of animals in science. Four awards were presented to people and organisations who have paved the way for the Concordat by showing the sector that openness was possible, even when faced with significant opposition. Long-time openness advocate Fiona Fox, Director of the Science Media Centre, presented the first award to Professor Sir Colin Blakemore. At a time when to ‘come out’ about animal research in public could lead to significant threats and acts of extremism, Professor Blakemore was a vocal public advocate for the benefits of animal research. Paget2014-5.jpg Dr Domenico Spina from the British Pharmacological Society presented the second award to the Medical Research Council in recognition of their constant willingness to work with the press. This work has included the first live radio broadcast from inside the animal facility at MRC Harwell, during which BBC 5 Live journalist Victoria Derbyshire witnessed a mouse being euthanized live on air. Huntingdon Life Sciences were presented with the third award by Bernadette Kelly of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. Despite significant pressure from extremists, including attacks on its staff and suppliers, HLS has always sought to work openly with the media. Finally, the council of UAR chose to give the final Openness Award to UAR CEO Wendy Jarrett, in recognition of her work to develop the Concordat on Openness, and for acting as a champion of the openness agenda.
Six animal technologists gathered together to describe their careers in this video from the Institute of Animal Technology. It gives a fresh and honest perspective of the job of the animal tech as the interviewees answer questions about their work, the highs and the lows, and how they came to be in this line of the work in the first place. More information about careers in animal technology can be found on the Institute of Animal Technology website.
This film shows some of the aspects of zebrafish production and maintenance. Zebrafish embryos, unlike mouse embryos, develop outside the mother’s body and are transparent throughout the first few days of life. This provides unparallelled opportunities for researchers to scrutinise the fine details of embryonic vertebrate development without first having to resort to invasive procedures or killing the mother. This advantage is enhanced by the fact zebrafish can produce 200-300 fertilised eggs every week. High Definition clips from this film are available on request to office@uar.org.uk.
Dogs are used in small numbers in medical research in the UK, usually as a second mammal in safety testing. UK law requires that potential new medicines are tested on two mammal species, typically a rodent and dog or pig. These dogs were filmed in a research facility in the UK in 2014. See more about animal research here: www.uar.org.uk and read about the number of animals used in medical research here: http://www.understandinganimalresearch.org.uk/news/2013/07/2012-animal-research-statistics-from-the-home-office/
Organ transplants fail because they are rejected by their new body. Animal research is producing better treatments for rejection but even so, organs rarely last more than 15 years. In this film we hear the story of one man whose kidneys failed when he was still at college. His interview is inter-cut with an interview from a surgeon and a few moments of animal research. You can read more about the science behind transplantation here: animalresearch.info and hear more from the surgeon here: vimeo.com/86121247
This presentation outlines the research and development that led to Herceptin, the first effective monoclonal antibody treatment for breast cancer. Herceptin is a classic example of a medicine that could only have been created with animal research as Herceptin was developed using rats, mice, hamsters and macaques. The journey started when the HER2 protein was discovered in tumours of rats in 1982. In 1985 monoclonal antibodies were used to successfully target HER2 in mice. Then in 1987 the discovery of human breast cancers with high HER2 levels opened the possibility that monoclonal antibodies could form the basis of a treatment. A power-point version of this presentation can be downloaded from our website in the document resources section: http://www.understandinganimalresearch.org.uk/media-library/download/document/137/
Otters are at the top of their food web and concentrate (bio-accumulate) man-made toxic and/or non-biodegradable chemicals in their bodies. Samples taken from dead otters have been used to monitor pollution for around 20 years. The otter project also investigate many other aspects of otter (Lutra lutra) biology and ecology. Find out more: www.otterproject.cf.ac.uk
Toxoplasmosis infects people, cats, otters and many other animals. The Otter project at Cardiff University is tracking the disease by taking samples from dead otters.
Each year the UK Home Office publishes animal research statistics. These include the number of 'procedures' performed that year. The term procedure refers to any act that may cause an animal a level of pain equivalent to or greater than the introduction of a hypodermic needle. Even breeding a genetically modified animal classifies as a procedure as the genetic changes can cause distress.
Consultant surgeon Geoff Koffman explains that while the prognosis for kidney transplant has improved rejection is still a problem. We also hear how research with mice has reduced this problem. Mice with two hearts are used to investigate the process of rejection. Transplanting a heart from one mouse to another takes great surgical skill.
Genetic modification, taking genes from one animal and putting them in another sounds like science fiction but has become an essential tool for modern medical research. In this short animated film, Dr Siouxsie Wiles from the University of Auckland explains how and why it is done.
Geoff Butcher has Parkinson's disease. Here we hear him interview a scientist who uses Marmosets as an animal model to investigate Parkinson's disease. The scientist does this by using a chemical called MPTP to destroy the substantia nigra in the Marmosets. This is the part of the brain that is associated with the fine control of movement. It is damage to the substantia nigra that caused the symptoms of Parkinson's disease. The discovery of MPTP was an accident. Drug-users took contaminated material and developed Parkinsonian-like symptoms. This led to the unravelling of a medical mystery described in The Case of The Frozen Addicts reviewed here: http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199612263352618
Research into new heart medicines is being helped by these dogs. The dogs are exercised daily and trained to work with the researchers, by jumping onto weighing scales for example. Heart function is measured using ultrasound scanning, much like the scanning used to see the developing foetus in a pregnant women.
We walk around King's College animal research facility with one of the animal technologists who in this episode shows us mice, rats, rabbits and guinea pigs.
Professor Michael Schneider of Imperial College tells Alan Keys about how stem cell research is leading to treatments for heart disease. Michael describes how the availability of stem cells allows his team to determine the molecules involved in heart cell death and also how to protect those cells from death during a heart attack. Michael foresees a near future where stem cells are combined with other therapies to both repair hearts and enable hearts to self-repair. Alan Keys had his own heart repaired during an operation some years ago and currently chairs a British Heart Foundation patients committee. The British Heart Foundation part-fund the work of Michael's team at Imperial College.
Naked molerats can live for more than thirty years in captivity, far more than than other rodents. What is more they don't appear to get cancer. We don't know why they live so long, but sequencing the naked mole rat genome might give some clues. In this video we hear from Dr Chris Faulkes from Queen Mary, London University. Chris has a colony of molerats in London and showed them to me during our interview. We've uploaded a transcript of the full interview to give you even more insights into naked mole rats and what their unique biology can reveal. More information can be found here: Naked Mole-Rat Genome Resource: http://naked-mole-rat.org Naked mole rat DNA exposes its age-defying secrets: http://bit.ly/sJKcIF About Chris Faulkes: http://webspace.qmul.ac.uk/cgfaulkes/
Mice can be used to mimic Alzheimer's disease in humans. Alzheimer's disease is the most common type of dementia. Currently there are no effective treatments so mice models offer one approach to both understanding and developing treatments for Alzheimer's. Here we see mice digging and burrowing. Find more information about Alzheimer's disease here: http://alzheimers.org.uk/ More science here: Deacon, R.M.J. Digging and marble burying in mice: simple methods for in vivo identification of biological impacts. Nat. Protocols 1, 122 - 124 (2006). http://www.nature.com/nprot/journal/v1/n1/full/nprot.2006.20.html
Dr Robin Lovell-Badge explains why putting human cells into an animal can be a good thing and the circumstances (according to the Academy of Medical Sciences and the public) when it would be unacceptable.
Human reproductive disorders such as low-sperm count and testicular cancer can start early in development so it is hard to know 20-30 years later what might have caused them. Professor Richard Sharpe, MRC, explains that growing human testis tissue in mice allows scientists to measure the impact of the chemicals that are suspected to cause reproductive disorders. This is just one example of human tissue in animals considered by the Academy for Medical Sciences consultation that can be read here: http://www.acmedsci.ac.uk/p47prid77.html
This video has been distributed to General Practitioners surgeries to accompany our leaflet of the same name. You can download the leaflet from our website here: http://bit.ly/h3RFAA The video has sub-titles because the TV volume is usually turned down in waiting rooms!
We hear from Chloe, who has diabetes, and Dr. Aileen King, who researches into diabetes. Research on dogs led to the discovery of insulin in the 1920's. Before this becoming diabetic led to death. Now Aileen's research with mice is looking for the best way to transplant insulin producing cells from donors to diabetic people. The cells are encapsulated in a gel to protect them from the immune cells after the transplant.
This short video outlines how much animal research is done in the UK. Numbers, types and context are all covered.
In this film we hear about the experience of having asthma from Tim Wilson and about how animal research has contributed to treating asthma from Professor Clive Page. Read more about asthma on our website here: http://www.understandinganimalresearch.org.uk/your_health/asthma_inhalers We also recommend Asthma UK as a source of information
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