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
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