The Ethics of Animal use in Research

so i’m doing my phd

here at queen’s and i look at the

interactions in between the nervous

system

and the immune system after spinal cord

injury

how those interactions result in the

development of chronic pain

and how we can potentially alter those

interactions

to provide patients with pain relief in

my work

i use a mouse model of spinal cord

injury that does a really good job at

mimicking the human model of spinal cord

injury

although i usually don’t tell people i

just met that last part

because although we owe almost all of

our medical

modern advancements to the use of

laboratory animals

their topic in research can be an

uncomfortable one for many people

and some are completely against their

use altogether

so in february of 2019 an article was

published in the queen’s journal

titled the curtain on animal research at

queen’s lifts and inch

i felt like it was a really negative

depiction

of animal use and research and it

suggested in a lot of ways that

scientists were

stuck in a rut and refused to adapt as

technology moved

forward and indeed if you look online

a lot of the journalism out there is

about how

we have advanced past the use of needing

animals

and a lot of people who do support

animal research don’t like to be too

vocal and talk about it

because in the past themselves or their

families have been harmed or threatened

so i decided in march of 2019 to write

kind of a

response piece to this and i titled it

a letter from a queen’s researcher

animal testing is unfairly judged

at the time i published the article

anonymously

and although i got a bunch of different

friends from a variety of different

backgrounds to read it over

and we had some really insightful

discussions about it i was a little bit

nervous about how people would receive

it

some liked it and others weren’t such of

a

big fan a lot of people thought again

technology has advanced we don’t need

animals in research anymore

some thought that animal research was

cruel and pointless and others thought

that

it just wasn’t right for us to subject

animals to this use

when there’s alternatives

so i think that even though animal

research is one of those uncomfortable

topics it’s a little bit

one of those ethically gray areas it’s

important for us to talk about it

because how can all of you make an

informed stance

on it if you are only given one side of

the story

and i think in a time where there’s

increased public and patient engagement

in research

this is becoming ever more important

so let’s begin by talking about the

legislation behind annual research

so if you are a researcher or a

university

in canada and you would like to use

animals in any capacity

this does include animal testing but it

also includes

animal observation or if you’re using

them to train professionals like

training veterinarians or veterinary

technicians you must obtain

a certification of good animal practice

from the canadian animal care committee

and

this committee gives its certification

out and every three years it must be

renewed

and how it gets renewed is that the

canadian animal care committee will come

to the

institution on a surprise visit so

there’s no tweaking things beforehand

and they will inspect every room and

they’ll look at all the products being

used

and potentially any animals on study

and each university also has their own

animal care committee

but this committee is primarily

concerned with

the protocols and procedures that will

be happening on site or in direct

affiliation with the university

and animal care committees are composed

of a variety of different peoples from

different

backgrounds there are researchers who do

use animals in their work

as well as laboratory technicians who

deal with the day-to-day care of animals

and the university’s head veterinarian

but there’s also researchers

who don’t use animals in their work at

all or commit

community members who have no

affiliation

to the university these protocols are

approved based on the three r’s of

animal research

which are reduction replacement and

refinement

reduction is reducing the number of

animals you would need in your study

and also being able to justify why you

need the animal numbers that you do

replacement can be either replacing your

laboratory animal with an inanimate

system like a computational modeling

system

or it could be replacing your animal

with a less sentient version

and sentience has to do with how

organisms can perceive and process the

environment around them

so an example of this is replacing maybe

a laboratory rat

with a snail or a fish or an insect

and refinement has to do with altering

the process itself

to ensure the model organism is

minimized in the amount of discomfort

and pain it experiences

and the animal care committee each

person must be

okay with the protocol that gets

approved so it’s not a situation where

one person can just be overpowered by

everyone else on the committee

so another common comment i commonly get

is that technology has advanced to a

point where we just don’t need animals

anymore

and don’t get me wrong there’s been some

phenomenal advancements with

computational modeling

and cell and tissue culturing techniques

and but the issue is if we want to

create therapeutics for human use

we are not yet at a point where animals

and their products can be completely cut

out of the research process

without it greatly hindering things

another amazing advancement that’s been

happening

is that scientific groups and

communities have moved towards sharing

their large data sets

as well as creating public databases for

people to use free of cost

so let’s say for example there’s a group

out there

who’s particularly interested in gene

changes that happen

in immune cells after spinal cord injury

perhaps they obtain some blood samples

from spinal cord injury patients

and they run an analysis on it and they

get a huge amount of data

when they’re ready to publish their

findings in a scientific journal

they have to release the entirety of the

data set

to the public for anyone to use i could

for then i could download this data set

maybe i run a different analysis

and pick out a couple different gene

targets

i could then move to a different public

database

one of which is called imgen and see

what the gene expression levels

are in up to 85 different immune cells

could then head back to my lab and use

cultured cell lines to see

if i alter the gene expression of this

immune cell how does that activity of

the cell change

some labs even have the equipment to 3d

print

small organs so we can see how the organ

as a total will change

but of course all of these techniques do

a great job at reducing the number of

organisms we need because before we even

move into a disease model

we might have already eliminated a

couple targets of interest

or maybe we have a better idea of the

disease mechanism itself

but the issue is cells in a petri dish

lack the overall organ architecture

which in some diseases can be super

important

and a 3d printed organ lacks the

interactions that happen

with other organs we are not just a

collection

of a bunch of organisms or a bunch of

organs really close together

all our organs communicate with one

another and the circulatory and immune

system play a huge role

another issue is that each one of our

cells

contains the exact same copy of dna

and this means that different cell types

could express the same genes or produce

the same proteins

so that’s sometimes why when there are

new drugs or new therapeutics you see

off-targeted effects that you didn’t

originally think would happen

another important thing to consider is

causation force versus correlation

so what do i mean by this maybe you took

some blood samples

from patients with and without chronic

low back pain

and maybe in your chronic low back pain

population you saw an increased level of

a certain protein

you cannot assume that that increase of

protein

is what’s causing people’s pain and it’s

not ethical to then medicate your

patients to lower that protein level

which then kind of brings us to a

trickier criticism of animal research

which is how can you say that the life

of a human

is more important than the life of an

animal

so going back to the three r’s of animal

research

sentience which is in the replacement

are

can refer to the ability of an organism

to sense the environment around it and

process it

and it’s a very delicate balance of

using the least sentient organism

possible

but still being able to get clinically

relevant data

so science has to a certain extent

created a hierarchy

of organism life

and even though there are differences

between humans and animals

animals are still contributing massively

to the biomedical science process

for example a recent development out of

the university of calgary

it has been that they found that if you

give ms patients or multiple sclerosis

patients

minocycline which is a common acne

medication

after their first ms event they will

reduce by half

the rate that they could go on to

develop chronic ms

and this is a huge finding for canada

because in canada we have one of the

highest rates of ms in the world

so this finding has done a great job of

improving the quality of life of

thousands of people

and would not have been possible without

the mouse model of multiple sclerosis

and also if you’re a diabetic who’s ever

taken insulin

or maybe an advil or an aspirin or you

went in for a routine surgery

and had to was prescribed antibiotics or

painkillers

you have animal research to thank

because of that

and the reality is scientists at this

time are just using the best models that

they have available

if a non-animal model was to come along

that was as good as or better than the

animal models that we currently use

science would move to adapt to use that

one

but at this point we don’t have those

models available for a lot of diseases

and at the end of the day it’s okay if

you’re uncomfortable with animal

research

it’s a very uncomfortable topic but

supporting animal research doesn’t need

to be an all or nothing approach

you can support the use of animals in

biomedical research

but maybe you don’t support their use in

cosmetic research

or you can read a scientific journal

article and be really critical

about the methods that they used or the

conclusions that they drew from their

study

but making generalized blanket

statements like

all animal research is barbaric and

unnecessary

is simply untrue so why do i

use animals in my work so like i

mentioned i study chronic pain that

develops after a spinal cord injury

and in the province of ontario 11 people

each week

will suffer from a spinal cord injury

and for each one of these patients it

will take them approximately two to

three years

to stabilize and when they do finally

stabilize

they are often faced with a whole host

of medical complications

even though the trauma itself is to the

central nervous system

many different body systems can be

affected

for example heart rate breathing blood

pressure the digestive system the

urinary tract system

movement the musculoskeletal system and

mental health can all be affected

and for sixty to eighty percent of these

patients they will go on to develop

chronic pain

and at this point doctors don’t really

have a lot of effective treatments to

offer this population

and of the treatments that they do have

available many of them

do not lower the patient’s pain to a

rate where they can

live a healthy productive life that they

would like to live

so through the use of computational

modeling

cell and tissue culturing techniques

microbiome analysis

and a new mouse model of spinal cord

injury that i developed

that more accurately mimics a human

spinal cord injury

i hope to go on to help develop better

therapeutics to offer these patients

some pain relief

and at the end of the day i know my

research will be difficult

and it will of course have limitations

to it but i know that people would not

be able to live the quality of life that

they currently do

without the irreplaceable contribution

of many laboratory animals over the

years

thank you

you