That's a great read, especially for a large audience.
As I'm quite involved in this field, I found this article to be an honest view of the current situation.
I might gain some insight by developing the actual efforts of the scientific community in homecage monitoring and automation. A lot of efforts are ongoing in this field and will positively affect the welfare of these animals.
In addition, open data with FAIR principles should be considered the next major effort in preclinical studies. The publication strategy emphasizes data analysis and hypothesis testing as the main outcomes of science. However, the underlying data is often hard to find, poorly documented, and not accessible for automation in many cases.
BioFAIR (https://biofair.uk) seems to be moving in the right direction, as recently announced. Hopefully, national stakeholders will see the benefits of this kind of project.
Thank you so much for taking the time to read and to comment Benoit. I appreciate the note about monitoring and automation. As I commented below to Michael, I have heard lots of exciting updates about how this technology could be implemented in insect rearing and even aquaculture, but I need to learn more about how it could be used for mammals.
I appreciate you sharing BioFAIR's work as well. It looks interesting!
Xander, really enjoyed this piece! Probably one of the most interesting, balanced and well researched articles I've read.
There are a few additions that could be made to your suggestions on welfare improvement. First is better monitoring and a better consistency/standard of day-to-day care.
Currently, in facilities that house 10k-100k animals, a human needs to check each cage once a day, and also do any basic care operations (food/water/bedding exchange, removal of fighting animals) by hand. As you can imagine, even in best-intentioned facilities, this is not 100% - simply because of constrictions on work-force. E.g. when it's Christmas or COVID season suddenly you may have half a capacity.
Second is better reproducibility of data collection. Right now, the level of tech in animal research is that almost everything is measured by physical human hand. I.e. - want to know how strong a mouse is? Have it grab a force sensor and pull it by its tail. Then repeat 10x to get a reasonable average. Because the tech is so poor, human factor is high, so reproducibility is poor. Also, manual handling causes stress, another source of lost welfare and reproducibility.
For anyone not working directly with animals, these two issues are almost always unknown.
I finished my PhD at Harvard about a year ago, engineering gene therapies for aging. To measure the effect of these therapies, I had to do all the above - and it took me about 8 months of continuous work to perform the manual health assays necessary to get a basic dataset.
It was in fact so bad that I realized that 1) getting data from animals was a civilization-scale bottleneck 2) the equivalent of "phenomics" for health had never been created, by anyone.
So I quit academia to build a company around this (Olden labs) - with my answer to the above is to engineer automation that vastly improve data collection, monitoring and basic care.
I'd argue that if we can deploy these at scale and get to a world where animals are routinely monitored 24/7 with objective metrics and alerts, we can also quantify welfare much better - and therefore design and test welfare interventions like the ones you proposed above.
On which note - I do have to say I'm skeptical about engineering away pain. People without pain sensitivity have short lifespans and are always bruised. It's there for a reason. And academics don't want to use models that have different/compromised behaviors from the getgo.
Michael, thank you for your thoughtful comment. I definitely under emphasized the role of better consistency/standards with day-to-day care (mostly due to length), but I agree with you that it is centrally important. I am very excited about the way automation and data collection can improve standards of care, especially when it comes to more humane insect farming. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168169923008918
Also, I understand your skepticism re: engineering away pain. This is why I tried to emphasize that the goal would be more so to modulate and reduce pain down to levels that are more appropriate for the lab. As you highlighted, fully engineering away pain is impracticable.
That's a great read, especially for a large audience.
As I'm quite involved in this field, I found this article to be an honest view of the current situation.
I might gain some insight by developing the actual efforts of the scientific community in homecage monitoring and automation. A lot of efforts are ongoing in this field and will positively affect the welfare of these animals.
In addition, open data with FAIR principles should be considered the next major effort in preclinical studies. The publication strategy emphasizes data analysis and hypothesis testing as the main outcomes of science. However, the underlying data is often hard to find, poorly documented, and not accessible for automation in many cases.
BioFAIR (https://biofair.uk) seems to be moving in the right direction, as recently announced. Hopefully, national stakeholders will see the benefits of this kind of project.
Thank you so much for taking the time to read and to comment Benoit. I appreciate the note about monitoring and automation. As I commented below to Michael, I have heard lots of exciting updates about how this technology could be implemented in insect rearing and even aquaculture, but I need to learn more about how it could be used for mammals.
I appreciate you sharing BioFAIR's work as well. It looks interesting!
Xander, really enjoyed this piece! Probably one of the most interesting, balanced and well researched articles I've read.
There are a few additions that could be made to your suggestions on welfare improvement. First is better monitoring and a better consistency/standard of day-to-day care.
Currently, in facilities that house 10k-100k animals, a human needs to check each cage once a day, and also do any basic care operations (food/water/bedding exchange, removal of fighting animals) by hand. As you can imagine, even in best-intentioned facilities, this is not 100% - simply because of constrictions on work-force. E.g. when it's Christmas or COVID season suddenly you may have half a capacity.
Second is better reproducibility of data collection. Right now, the level of tech in animal research is that almost everything is measured by physical human hand. I.e. - want to know how strong a mouse is? Have it grab a force sensor and pull it by its tail. Then repeat 10x to get a reasonable average. Because the tech is so poor, human factor is high, so reproducibility is poor. Also, manual handling causes stress, another source of lost welfare and reproducibility.
For anyone not working directly with animals, these two issues are almost always unknown.
I finished my PhD at Harvard about a year ago, engineering gene therapies for aging. To measure the effect of these therapies, I had to do all the above - and it took me about 8 months of continuous work to perform the manual health assays necessary to get a basic dataset.
It was in fact so bad that I realized that 1) getting data from animals was a civilization-scale bottleneck 2) the equivalent of "phenomics" for health had never been created, by anyone.
So I quit academia to build a company around this (Olden labs) - with my answer to the above is to engineer automation that vastly improve data collection, monitoring and basic care.
I'd argue that if we can deploy these at scale and get to a world where animals are routinely monitored 24/7 with objective metrics and alerts, we can also quantify welfare much better - and therefore design and test welfare interventions like the ones you proposed above.
On which note - I do have to say I'm skeptical about engineering away pain. People without pain sensitivity have short lifespans and are always bruised. It's there for a reason. And academics don't want to use models that have different/compromised behaviors from the getgo.
Michael, thank you for your thoughtful comment. I definitely under emphasized the role of better consistency/standards with day-to-day care (mostly due to length), but I agree with you that it is centrally important. I am very excited about the way automation and data collection can improve standards of care, especially when it comes to more humane insect farming. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168169923008918
Also, I understand your skepticism re: engineering away pain. This is why I tried to emphasize that the goal would be more so to modulate and reduce pain down to levels that are more appropriate for the lab. As you highlighted, fully engineering away pain is impracticable.
Thanks again,
Xander