Assessing the welfare of mice used in cancer research

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

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.