CO 025: PRINCIPLE OF REDUCTION AND THE VALIDITY AND EFFICIENCY OF ANIMAL ASSAYS

J Pharm Pharmacogn Res 2(Suppl. 1): S14, 2014

Special supplement with the abstract book of LATINFARMA 2013

Oral Communication

CO 025: PRINCIPLE OF REDUCTION AND THE VALIDITY AND EFFICIENCY OF ANIMAL ASSAYS

Rosenkranz A.

Bioterio Central, FCEyN, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina. E-mail: rosenkranza@yahoo.com.ar

Abstract

According the International Guiding Principles animals should only be used when necessary and the Principles of the Three Rs should be incorporated in the design and conduct of the activities and, when no alternative methods are available to replace the use of live animals, the minimum number of animals should be used to achieve the goals. The most important international Journals require the authors to follow International Guidelines like the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals, NRC, USA, that request for justification of the number of animals and experimental group sizes. In order to assure valid and reproducible experiments it is imperative to use animals with a defined dramatype. Factors such as: species, strains, sex, age, weight, cage, bedding , temperature, humidity, air velocity, noise, light, odors, day of the week, circadian rhythms, nutrition, presence of microorganisms, human/animal interaction, order of administration of substances and order of euthanasia may affect the response of the animals and introduce bias or lower the precision of the results of the experiments. Adequate reporting of the conditions of animal use are important to enable replication, and also to allow readers to judge scientific quality, but analyses of published studies with research animals have demonstrated numerous deficiencies in the reporting of details of research methods for animal studies and many papers omitted the number of animals used. An unspoken industry rule alleges that at least 50% of published studies from academic laboratories cannot be repeated in an industrial setting, Unavoidable variability could be controlled using an experimental design with randomized blocks. The range of applicability might be extended using factorial designs. The analysis should always be appropriate to the type of experimental design used. Several studies demonstrate that inappropriate statistical methods were used in more than 60% of papers. The editors of scientific journals should promote high-quality reporting.