Humane Seal

Three Ducks Saved by Heroic Act of Compassion

noreply@blogger.com (Humane Seal) — Mon, 5 Oct 2009 07:47:00 -0700

Three Ducks Saved by Heroic Act of Compassion

When good Samaritan Rina Deych and her son Julian decided to go food shopping one day in September 2009, they didn’t suspect that a trip to the grocery store would turn into a dramatic rescue. But when they drove by Boro Park in their hometown of Brooklyn, New York, they saw a throng of people gathered together, and as they got closer could hardly believe their eyes: a circle of children were taunting and tormenting three little ducks lying helplessly on the ground, while the adults just stood by and watched.

Shocked by the scene they’d stumbled upon, Rina jumped out of her car and demanded that the mob stop hurting the battered and terrified young ducks. Sadly, according to Rina, only two people among the crowd acknowledged that she was right to stand up against the senseless cruelty that was occurring. As Rina and Julian scooped the ducks up into their car, one man thanked the pair before they drove off with the birds in tow.

Skipping their supermarket spree, Rina and Julian brought the ducks – now named Mishka, Fedor and Alexi – back to their house to feed and care for them. Mishka seemed to have some film over his eyes and they were all missing a few feathers, indicating they may have been packed tightly in cages with their bodies forced to rub against wire. However, we are still not quite sure where the ducks came from: perhaps they had fallen off a truck en route to a live market, places where city dwellers can hand select animals for slaughter, or (because they are male Moulards) were bred for foie gras production.

The Deych family knew that Mishka, Fedor and Alexi couldn’t live with them forever, so they started making calls to find their friends a new home. Rina quickly got in touch with Farm Sanctuary, and we arranged for the birds to be transported to our New York Shelter, where they could be given all the loving attention and care that they will need to recover.

These days, Mishka, Fedor and Alexi can be found convalescing in their very own hospital stall, complete with a little swimming pool. Right now, they are being treated for wounds and scrapes, and Mishka, who sustained such severe trauma to his eye that he may never see out of it again, is scheduled to see an ophthalmologist this week. Once their health improves, we will be looking for a loving, permanent home where these three boys can live out the rest of their days in safety and peace.

human sea: physicians the techniques involved in emergency care

noreply@blogger.com (Humane Seal) — Sun, 4 Oct 2009 04:32:00 -0700

Many medical centers offer courses to teach physicians the techniques involved in emergency care for trauma patients. The best of these trauma courses offer training using human cadavers and life-like simulators to demonstrate and allow development of invasive trauma skills.

Students and instructors alike agree that the learning experience is enhanced when training is based entirely on human anatomy. Additionally, the cost advantage can be significant. The University of Maryland Medical System in Baltimore is one training center leading the way with an innovative program using life-like simulators and human cadavers. Philip Militello, M.D., an instructor at Maryland, explains, “It has become clear that students enjoy doing the procedures on a human cadaver specimen because of the identical scenarios, landmarks, and the hands-on experience. It mirrors the clinical scenario and is very well received.”

A 1995 Survey indicated that 75 percent of physician respondents would prefer to enroll in a human anatomy-based course, compared to one using animals. Thirty-eight percent said they would pay more for such a course, and 43 percent would travel further to take one.

For an inside look at the University of Maryland Medical System’s state-of-the-art program, Watch the video in QuickTime now>>

Emergency Care of the Trauma Patient: Human Cadavers and Simulators Offer Advantages over Animal Laboratories

Listing of cities where simulator and/or human cadaver-based advanced trauma courses are currently offered.

Information on access to cadaveric specimens for medical centers

NEWS: The Committee on Trauma of the ACS has approved the use of simulators to teach Advanced Trauma Life Support.

The SIMULAB TraumaMan^® surgical trainer is an anatomical human simulator designed to teach surgical procedures in Advanced Trauma Life Support courses. Visit www.simulab.com for more information.

Dr Hadwen Trust research wins non-animal replacement prize

noreply@blogger.com (Humane Seal) — Wed, 6 May 2009 15:15:00 -0700

Dr Hadwen Trust-funded researchers studying breast cancer have this week won a prestigious non-animal replacement prize at an event held at the House of Lords.

Dr Deborah Holliday, now based at the Department of Pathology and Tumour Biology, Leeds Institute of Molecular Medicine, and colleagues from Queen Mary’s, University of London, have constructed a 3-dimensional model of human breast cancer in the test tube. The model uses human cells from cancerous and healthy breast tissue donated by volunteers and is set to help replace experiments using up to 400 mice per test and typically involving implanting tumours, abdominal drug injections and serial ‘harvesting’ of tumours.

The event was hosted by the National Centre for the Replacement, Refinement and Reduction of Animals in Research¹ (NC3Rs) as part of its celebrations to mark the 50th anniversary of Russell and Burch’s² concept of replacement, reduction and refinement of animal experiments (3Rs). The research, which was published in Breast Cancer Research journal³ was funded by the Dr Hadwen Trust for Humane Research as part of our programme to pioneer new techniques to replace animals in medical experiments.

Deborah displayed a poster detailing this work at the event where a judging panel selected the best poster from each of the 3Rs. Deborah’s won the replacement section, scooping a prize of £3,000. The posters were judged on their impact on the 3Rs, quality of the science and the researchers’ ability to communicate to a lay audience.

Dr Holliday says: ”This is an exciting development in both breast cancer research and the replacement of animals so I am thrilled at the award . Understanding how individual cell populations contribute to cancer progression is essential in increasing our understanding of breast cancer and identifying new targets for therapy. Being able to model this in a complex human 3-D culture model provides us with a valuable tool to investigate this without the use of animal experiments.”

Notes

¹ The NC3Rs was established in 2004 by the government www.nc3rs.org.uk.

² W.M.S. Russell and R.L. Burch (1959) The Principles of Humane Experimental Technique. London, UK: Methuen

³ Novel multicellular organotypic models of normal and malignant breast: tools for dissecting the role of the microenvironment in breast cancer progression Deborah L Holliday, Kellie T Brouilette, Anja Markert, Linda A Gordon, J Louise Jones.

⁴ A research overview of this project can be found on our ScienceRoom Website.

Drug Experiment: FDA Eyes Simulated Studies

noreply@blogger.com (Humane Seal) — Wed, 6 May 2009 15:11:00 -0700

The agency plans to use new computer technology to simulate how some drugs in development are supposed to work, in hopes of identifying safety and effectiveness issues before late-stage clinical trials are completed, The Wall Street Journal writes.

Entelos, the biotech that developed the technology, claims this will allow researchers to obtain computer-generated test results in a matter of days or weeks, compared with years required for most major clinical trials. Far more “simulated patients” also can be tested than in conventional human trials.

Under an agreement with the FDA, three drugs now being studied for heart-related conditions in large human trials will be tested by the simulation technology, the paper writes, although the drugs involved in the project are not being disclosed.

The agreement is part of a broader effort by the FDA to get a bead on safety and efficacy, and to identify characteristics of patients that lead some to benefit from a drug while others are at risk of a bad outcome. A particular aim of the project is to see if simulated studies might indicate if the drugs could be linked to heart attacks and other cardiovascular events in cases too rare to be picked up in conventional clinical trials, the paper writes.

“What this study is about is trying to anticipate bad scenarios before they occur,” Robert Powell, associate director in the office of translational sciences in the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, tells the Journal.

He adds that regulators “wouldn’t make a decision to kill a drug based on a simulation,” but the findings could be used in discussions with drugmakers to influence decisions such as the design of clinical trials. Eventually such info also could affect prescribing information included in drug labels.

Both the FDA and drugmakers have used computer simulation in drug development, but have typically been limited to analyzing data generated in actual clinical trials, he notes. This project is different because it will evaluate drug data by plugging it into a virtual model of disease.

The effort follows controversies over Vioxx and the Avandia diabetes pill that were linked to increased heart-attack risk long after they were approved for the market. Merck withdrew the painkiller in 2004, while Glaxo’s Avandia remains on the market, the paper points out.

Entelos says its technology, called the Cardiovascular PhysioLab, uses a mathematical model to simulate how cholesterol functions in the human body and how deposits of fatty material called plaque develop in the artery walls and become prone to rupture, the Journal writes. By running certain chemical characteristics of drugs through the model, the hope is to be able to predict whether the compounds might cause cardiovascular problems and, if so, in what types of patients.

The program is “a flight simulator” for drug testing, Entelos ceo Jim Karis tells the paper. “What we’ve done is created underlying technology to mathematically represent human biology, and then you can do things to it to see what happens.” And guess what? He believes the program, which was finished in 2007, could have detected the issues that ultimately doomed Vioxx.

Mouse trap? Stanford immunologist calls for more research on humans, not mice

noreply@blogger.com (Humane Seal) — Wed, 6 May 2009 15:06:00 -0700

The fabled laboratory mouse — from which we have learned so much about how the immune system works — can teach us only so much about how we humans get sick and what to do about it, says a leading researcher at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

The time has come for immunologists to start weaning themselves from experimental rodents and to embark on a bold, industrial-scale assault on the causes and treatment of specifically human disease, writes immunologist Mark Davis, PhD, in an essay to be published Dec. 19 in Immunity. Davis, director of the Stanford Institute for Immunity, Transplantation and Infection, proposes that the current mouse-centered, small-laboratory approach be supplemented by a broad, industrial-scale "systems biology" approach akin to the one that unraveled the human genome.

"We seem to be in a state of denial, where there is so much invested in the mouse model that it seems almost unthinkable to look elsewhere," Davis, the Burton and Marion Avery Family Professor and professor of microbiology and immunology, writes in the essay.

Over the past several decades, the little mouse has proven immensely helpful in generating a fundamental understanding of how the mammalian immune system works, Davis said in an interview. "The mouse has been incredibly valuable," he added. "That's part of the problem."

Experimental manipulations that are commonplace with lab mice, such as genetically engineering them to express a foreign protein or to be deficient in the expression of one of their own, would be unthinkable in a human. Because experimental mice can be used to get quick answers, Davis argues, researchers look to the mouse to tell them everything. "In humans it often takes years to find out anything. There are a lot more regulatory, financial and ethical hurdles," he said.

But when it comes to adapting therapeutic interventions that seem to cure all kinds of infectious disease, cancers and autoimmune conditions in mice for use in human beings, the record is not so good. The vast majority of clinical trials designed to test these interventions in people end in failure.

"Mice are lousy models for clinical studies," Davis asserts in his essay.

There are probably some good reasons for this, said Davis. For starters, mice are rodents, separated from humans by some 65 million years of evolutionary divergence from our common ancestor.

That's not all. While it takes about 20 years for a person to reach sexual maturity, a mouse gets there in three months. The roughly 100 years during which the furry, diminutive animals have been domesticated and bred in labs are, therefore, the mouse equivalent of 8,000 human years, during which they have been inbred and kept relatively disease-free. They would never survive in the wild, said Davis.

Meanwhile, the past 8,000 years have seen humans crowded into cities, he said. "We've been selected by urbanization, with plagues such as the bubonic plague and smallpox that routinely killed huge numbers of people, and modern scourges like HIV and malaria that still infect and kill millions each year. Most humans are infected with six different herpes viruses, and who knows what else. And while we're suffering away, getting colds and flu, the mice are living in the lap of luxury in miniature condominiums, with special filters on the cage tops to keep bad things out." They're in such pristine shape, Davis notes drily, that researchers have to induce facsimiles of human disease in them. These conditions may or may not accurately mirror ours.

"We can't depend on the mouse for all the answers, because in some cases it's not giving us the right answers," Davis said. "But think about what we can do with people. People come to hospitals, get vaccinations, give blood and tissue samples for routine lab tests and clinical trials. We're not learning nearly as much as we could from these samples. As with the recent history of human genetics, we could be much bolder."

The Human Genome Project, which has radically accelerated the pace of human genetics, was conducted as a large industrial operation carried out mainly in a small number of large centers, including one at Stanford. In a spirited debate attending that project's initial conception, many academics objected strenuously on the basis that doing the same thing over and over isn't a good way to train students and researchers, said Davis. But, he added, "The Human Genome Project didn't destroy the small lab. It complemented it."

In his Immunity essay, Davis writes: "Although the small academic labs as we know and love them are great for innovation and out-of-the-box thinking, some problems in biology, particularly those that involve a great deal of repetitive assays and data collection, are much better suited to a larger-scale organization and execution. The data are both more uniform and considerably cheaper."

Davis sees the need for a national or even international infrastructure to capture information from blood and tissue samples. A local template is Stanford's Human Immune Monitoring Core, run by Davis' colleague David Hirschberg. Affiliated investigators send human samples to this facility, where copious assays of cell types and immune secretions in blood and tissues extract data about experimental subjects' immune status, in a relatively short time. "This information goes back to the principal investigators, but it also gets captured in a database we're developing," Davis said.

The creation of high-throughput assays that could quickly and cheaply measure vast numbers of immunologic variables (many of them first elucidated in the mouse) in a standardized fashion among very large groups of people — some in excellent health, others suffering from one or another disease — would greatly advance immunological discovery, said Davis.

"What if we could define the normal range for all these parameters, and then see how they're changed by any of the over 100 infectious diseases, or 90-odd autoimmune disorders, or more than 120 inherited immune deficiencies that afflict us — or, for that matter, by aging or even vaccination? Maybe we could see something coming early on and start applying remedies to restore the normal balance and prevent the disease's progression."

Davis envisions routine clinical tests that, analogous to the serum lipid tests we take to learn our predisposition to cardiovascular disease, tell us what shape our immune system is in or what disease we're starting to get.

"The game here is that we don't know quite what we're looking for yet," he said. "But some of this information is going to be useful."

Meet The Animals

noreply@blogger.com (Humane Seal) — Mon, 4 May 2009 15:16:00 -0700

At least 115 million animals are used in laboratory experiments around the world each year¹—and even this may be an underestimation. Every day in research laboratories, animals are exposed to a battery of cruel experiments—although superior, nonanimal alternatives are available.

Who are the animals? They are dogs, cats, monkeys, rabbits, mice, horses, rats, birds, fish —and many others.

In research that often produces misleading results—and poses real risks to human health—they can experience early separation from their mothers, social isolation, prolonged captivity, sensory deprivation, and repeated physical harm. Then they are usually euthanized when they are no longer considered useful to research.

Science often neglects their wide array of psychological and social lives. When animals in a laboratory are denied basic social, psychological, and physical needs, including the ability to act on their natural instincts, they are deprived of the basic elements that are critical to their well-being.

The Humane Charity Seal

noreply@blogger.com (Humane Seal) — Mon, 4 May 2009 15:11:00 -0700

The Humane Charity Seal of Approval is the easiest way for donors to spot charities that are committed to providing vital services and care to patients or advancing research without the use of animals.

People who donate to charities want to know where their money is going. For many, a key concern is whether their donations might fund animal experiments. In fact, over 65 percent of adults recently surveyed said they would be more likely to donate to a health charity that had a policy of never funding animal experiments. Over 80 percent of those under 35 agreed.

With a rapidly expanding and diversifying list of approved charities, the Humane Charity Seal of Approval is leading the way into a new era of humane giving.