Assessing the welfare of mice used in cancer research

大量的老鼠被用于癌症研究，试图为人类开发新的治疗方法。公众对这些动物和任何其他用于研究的动物的主要担忧是，这是否会导致它们感到任何疼痛。确定这一点应该很容易，但事实并非如此。目前，科学家试图通过仔细评估这些动物，并在它们被认为遭受痛苦时人道地杀死它们，试图将任何痛苦或痛苦降到最低。我们进行这些评估的方式可能不是很有效，所以我们必须开发更好的方法，这样我们才能尽可能人道地对待动物。对于人类来说，正是我们在疼痛中所经历的情绪让我们感到如此不愉快，所以测量老鼠对疼痛的感受是很重要的。如果我们能做到这一点，那么我们就可以更好地评估他们的福利在不同类型的研究中是如何受到影响的。这个项目将测量在癌症研究中使用的小鼠可能经历的几种方式的疼痛。我们将测量检测疼痛的系统的变化；我们将测量随着肿瘤的生长而发生的行为变化，以确定可能表明疼痛的变化，我们将使用两种方法，让小鼠通过给予止痛剂的选择来显示它们可能感受到的疼痛。结合所有这些信息，我们可以确定不同类型的癌症何时发生疼痛，发生多少疼痛，以及我们如何通过仔细观察老鼠来检测到这一点。一旦我们成功地使用了让小鼠告诉我们它们在癌症疼痛研究中的感受的方法，我们也将能够在许多不同类型的研究中使用这些方法。这将让我们更准确地评估他们可能经历的痛苦程度，并让我们决定如何最好地限制或消除这种痛苦。

Large numbers of mice are used in cancer research to try to develop new treatments for people. A major public concern about these animals and any other animals used in research, is whether this causes them to feel any pain. It should be easy to determine this, but it is not. At present, scientists try to minimize any pain or distress by assessing the animals carefully, and humanely killing them if they are thought to be suffering. The way we make these assessments may not be very effective, so it is important that we develop better methods so we can treat animals as humanely as possible. In people, it is the emotions that we experience when we are in pain that make it so unpleasant, so it is important to measure how pain feels to mice. If we can do this, then we can make a much better assessment of how their welfare is affected during different types of research. This project will measure how much pain that mice used in cancer research may experience in several ways. We will measure changes to the systems that detect pain; we will measure the behavioural changes that occur as tumours grow to identify changes that may indicate pain, and we will use two methods that let mice show how much pain they may be feeling by the choices they make when given analgesics.Combining all of this information will let us establish when pain occurs with different types of cancer, how much pain occurs, and how we can detect this by carefully observing the mice. Once we have successfully used the methods that let mice tell us how they feel in this study of cancer pain, we will also be able to use the methods in many different types of research. This will let us assess how much pain they may experience much more accurately, and let us decide how best to limit or eliminate that pain.