Institute’s animal facility retains AAALAC accreditation

Key points:

• The Institute’s Biological Support Unit has received renewed accreditation by the Association for Assessment and Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care International (AAALAC) after first securing the voluntary accreditation in June 2022.
• AAALAC assessment involves a rigorous exploration of all aspects of animal use in research through a written description and a facility visit by two AAALAC representatives.
• The facility was commended for its knowledgeable and passionate staff and commitment to continuous improvement in animal welfare.

The Institute’s animal facility, the Biological Support Unit (BSU), has been successful in retaining AAALAC accreditation, an internationally-recognised standard for responsible animal care and use, after completing the detailed application process and hosting AAALAC representatives for a comprehensive facility assessment.

AAALAC assessment covers all aspects of animal care and use, including: animal welfare; equipment; professional, technical, and administrative support; and policies and programmes for institutional responsibilities, animal husbandry and veterinary care.

The Institute’s animal facility houses mice and rats to support the research of the Institute’s research teams as well as commercial life science companies, many of which are based on the Babraham Research Campus. 

The AAALAC visitors commended the facility on preparing an excellent, well written and thorough programme description which clearly outlined continuous improvement in animal welfare, for its knowledgeable, committed and passionate staff, and for clear evidence of a high standard of operations with robust management systems.

Dr Simon Cook, Institute Director, said: “I congratulate the whole facility and everyone involved in supporting the reaccreditation. Beyond recognising the excellent work of our facility team, we welcome the AAALAC review to continue to advance our facility operations in order to deliver the best for the mice in our care, our science and the staff in our facility. As the only academic facility with AAALAC accreditation in the Cambridge area this also helps us to provide assured provision for commercial users.”

Advancing ways of working

Since the last AAALAC review, the facility has implemented several operational and animal welfare improvements, including:

• appointment of a 3Rs champion (our Named Information Manager) who formally advocates for the use of the 3Rs (Reduction, Refinement and Replacement) within the facility, ensuring best practice at all times.
• establishing a sub-committee to undertake initial reviews of project licences.  The sub-committee draws on the valuable expertise on animal technicians in shaping a new project licence application before official scrutiny from the main ethics committee (AWERB). 
• introduction of ‘ghost sentinels’ to confirm the health status of animals. This innovation replicates the vital health monitoring that is needed within the facility but removes the need for live animals as sentinels and replaces them with filter papers that have been seeded with soiled cage material prior to being sent for analysis.
• consolidation of staff training and competency records and formal CPD into the animal record database. This provides all users with immediate access to these mandatory records.

Paul Symonds, co-Head of the BSU, said: “We welcomed the scrutiny from the AAALAC representatives and are delighted with their feedback and subsequent renewed accreditation.  This process is a real team effort at all levels and demonstrates the desire amongst us all to showcase the care and attention to animal welfare in order to deliver excellent science”.

“We’re very proud of the achievement of securing reaccreditation and for the facility being recognised as having made advancements since being initially accredited. During the on-site visit we were highly commended by the AAALAC officials for our excellent programme of animal care, and for the quality of our submitted information.” said Marc Wiltshire, co-Head of the BSU.

Animal research at the Institute

The use of mice is part of the Institute’s research in order to understand the molecular and cellular biology of how our bodies work and what changes with age and disease. Current projects using mice include:

• learning more about the interactions between metabolism and epigenetic control in ageing health.
• understanding the involvement of a key signalling pathway in cells in ageing, cancer and metabolism and whether we can modulate the pathway to improve health.
• exploring how biological timing works at a cellular level to better understand developmental processes, cell differentiation and ageing.

Mice are only used in research when there are no alternative ways to answer the research question and several groups across the Institute use alternative animal models, such as flies, nematode worms and yeast, alongside donated human samples.

The Institute has been a signatory of the Concordat on Openness on Animal Research in the UK since 2014 and has held Leader in Openness status since 2019. Details of our animal research and our animal welfare practices are shared in the animal research section on our website and we share the outcomes of our animal research in our news outputs.

Notes

Press contact: Dr Louisa Wood, Head of Communications, louisa.wood@babraham.ac.uk

Animal research statement: As a publicly funded research institute, the Babraham Institute is committed to engagement and transparency in all aspects of its research. Please see our dedicated web pages for further details of our animal research and our animal welfare practices.