The University of Cambridge is committed to increasing the awareness of animal welfare issues, legislation and good practice using animals in research. We will endeavour to promote the widest possible application of the 3Rs, including animal breeding, minimising surpluses, tissue sharing, and good surgical practice. We will establish a forum for ethical debate through AWERB and its sub-groups who will monitor the uptake of refinement resources such as recommended limit volumes for dosing and sampling, recording of clinical signs and coding of actual severity.
This area of the UBS Website is dedicated to providing the reader with information available and accessible to allow them to use in any area of animals in research and attend to 3Rs as widely as possible. Please use the links below and elsewhere at your disposal.
Animal Welfare and the 3Rs Have useful leaflets from Understanding Animal Research saying Animals cannot – and should not – be used unnecessarily in research, or allowed to experience avoidable suffering.
NC3Rs Vision 2015 to 2025 The NC3Rs mission is to replace, refine and reduce the use of animals in research. Their approach has been from the top down, to shape and respond to the scientific, regulatory and political landscape and from the bottom up, to empower scientists at an individual and organisational level to change practice this is their vison for the next 10 years.
The RSPCA Roadmap (pdf) is a ‘road map’ towards ending severe suffering, this poster is from a paper of the same name published by the RSPCA Research Animals department and should be considered by anyone who may consider severe research using animals as it provides very good arguments away from that decision.
SYRCLE SYstematic Review Centre for Laboratory animal Experimentation Research and education centre of the Central Animal Laboratory (CDL) of the Radboud University Medical Centre and Systematic Review (SR) is the methodological approach SYRCLE has adopted for the Syntheses of Evidence (SE).
3RGuide The Norwegian 3Rs centre Norecopa maintains a database, 3Rs Guide, of guidelines, information centres, journals, email lists, species specific information and databases for those planning and evaluating animal studies.
FRAME (Fund for the Replacement of Animals in Medical Experiments) was set up to promote and assist research into new techniques and valid scientific substitutes to replace animal research in medical, biological and pharmaceutical research. To help scientists effectively find and make use of the 3Rs, FRAME have put together some resources on the basic principles of searching for 3Rs information. It assumes no previous knowledge of search techniques or of the facilities available for obtaining information from the internet. It acts as a starting point for scientists, giving advice on terminology, correct strategies and available resources for efficiently conducting internet-based searches.