Institutional Animal Care & Use Committee (IACUC)

Alternatives to ANIMAL USE

According to the Animal Welfare Regulations, investigators are required to provide documentation that they have considered alternatives to pain or distress producing procedures. A pain or distress producing procedure is one that could reasonably be presumed to produce pain or distress in a person. Although analgesics, anesthetics, and other means of reducing pain or distress are usually used for such procedures, they do not change the fact that the procedures potentially may produce pain or distress.

The three Rs must be addressed in the protocol: refinements (in techniques), reductions (in the number of animals used), and replacements (with non-animal systems or animals lower on the phylogenic scale). Documentation may include a literature search. Investigators must provide the date of the search, the keywords used, the years covered by the search (a minimum of 10 years), and the databases searched.

Alternative Use References

  • Animal Welfare Information Center
  • AGRICOLA (AGRICulture OnLine Access, produced by the U.S. Department of Agricultures National Agricultural Library [NAL]) – Subject coverage includes agriculture in its broadest sense, alternatives to animal testing, animal behavior, animal sciences, animal welfare, laboratory animal medicine, physiology, veterinary medicine, wildlife, and zoology from 1970 to the present.
  • CAB ASTRACTS – Agriculture, animal health, veterinary medicine, laboratory animal medicine, husbandry, and welfare database indexing more than 11,000 journals, books, reports, newsletters, bibliographies, etc.
  • EMBASE (produced by Elsevier Science Publishers in The Netherlands) – Subject coverage includes all aspects of human medicine and in vivo and in vitro biomedical research on a wide variety of topics from 1974 to the present.
  • Johns Hopkins University Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing
  • MEDLINE (published by the U.S. National Library of Medicine) – Literature citations covering the broad field of biomedical and clinical research, veterinary medicine, laboratory animal science, animal welfare, and alternatives and covers the period from 1984 to the present.
  • National Library of Medicine
  • Norwegian Reference Centre for Laboratory Animal Science & Alternatives (NORINA) – Audiovisual Alternatives to Laboratory Animals In Teaching website (scroll down to and click on Search the NORINA Database)
  • PASCAL (produced by the French National Research Councils Institut de lInformation Scientifique et Technique) – This is a major multidisciplinary database that provides coverage of chemistry, biology, medicine, biomedical research, neurosciences, biotechnology, zoology, and agricultural sciences, and covers the period from 1973 to the present.
  • PUBMED
  • University of California at Davis

Contact

Lauren Brierley, D.V.M.
Director, Comparative Medicine Unit
Phone: 330-325-6558
Email: lbrierley@neomed.edu

Institutional Animal Care & Use Committee (IACUC)

Research Administration at NEOMED