A contemporary approach to the refinement of animal research highlights the importance of technology and the 3 R’s:
“Employing new in vivo technologies that can benefit animal welfare and science including methods to minimise pain and distress as well as to deliver enhancements in animal care, housing, handling, training and use”1
This definition fits well with my experience of animals in research – the less you stress your animals while running experiments, the better your data will be, and technology is an important way to reduce your impact on the animal whilst also improving your metrics.
My history with technology
As an example, for my PhD I wanted to investigate control of the cardiovascular system in a transgenic mouse model. I won’t go in to details here, but suffice to say it had a weird hypermetabolic phenotype which we thought would also impact the sympathetic control of the cardiovascular system. But how best to go about measuring this?
Let’s say you went to your GP with a suspected blood pressure issue, what would the doctor do? Most likely sit you down and measure your blood pressure with a plethysmograph (the cuff that goes on your arm and inflates) and your heart rate by counting beats. This was actually the first method I tried in my mice – we had a mouse-sized plethysmograph that works on the tail of the animal; it also comes with tubes to hold the mice steady while performing the experiment.



You don’t need to be a scientific researcher to realise that confining a mouse in a restricted holder like this will stress them out, even after repeated sessions of acclimatisation. And what happens when you’re stressed? Increased heart rate and blood pressure, which by definition makes this technique less than optimal.
However, it is possible to get decent data from such a system, so long as you bear in the mind the limitations when planning studies and drawing conclusions. As it happens, my transgenic mice that I used in this study were much smaller than the wildtypes, and as such I was unable to get reliable readings.
But, we really wanted to record blood pressure in this mouse model, so next step was to attempt a more invasive method to get a direct reading of blood pressure. This is possible, although technically very challenging in mice, by inserting a thin plastic tube into a major blood vessel and getting a direct readout of the pressure from inside the artery.
Obviously, you can’t go inserting a catheter into the artery of an awake mouse, so I anaesthetised my transgenics and learned how to insert the blood pressure catheter into the mouse’s carotid artery. We did get lovely blood pressure readings from this study, with the predictable caveat that it was performed in anaesthetised animals, and there aren’t many things in this world more likely to impact your cardiovascular system than being anaesthetised!
As it happens, we used a certain (old-school, not used in humans) anaesthetic known to have minimal impacts on the cardiovascular system. However, we knew we wouldn’t be able to publish the results without getting some kind of readings in an awake animal. This is where technology comes into the story, in the form of implantable telemetry.



It goes without saying that telemetry, while a great technological solution, is also technically quite challenging as well as prohibitively expensive. As such, and especially given that I was naïve to these methods, I opted for the easier biopotential transmitter to record ECG. Once I’d figured the experiments out and was able to get good heart rate recordings in awake freely moving mice, they formed the pinnacle of my PhD, and enabled us to publish the results.
In an ideal world, we would have used blood pressure telemetry (heart rate alone can give ambiguous results), but I think we made the correct decision at the time. One of my colleagues recently used the blood pressure telemeters, and had a terrible time of it – they’re just that much more difficult, especially the surgery.
Technology is important
Anyway, my takeaway message today relates the importance of technology and the 3 R’s for minimising the stress and harm done to animals in your experiments while simultaneously maximising the quality and impact of data you produce. I recently submitted a grant application to the NC3R’s with exactly this stated goal – to use my fibre-free optogenetics technology in vivo, to show that it has a marked benefit to animals in optogenetics studies, leading to a refinement, as outlined in the 3R’s.
1. Clark Br J Nutri 120(S1), S1-S7 (2018) The 3Rs in research: a contemporary approach to replacement, reduction and refinement