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Quality and validity in animal research

Published on October 31, 2016   35 min

A selection of talks on Plant & Animal Sciences

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0:00
My name is Anna Olsson. I'm a researcher at the Institute For Research and Innovation in Health at University of Porto in Portugal, the i3S. And I will be talking to you today about quality and validity in animal research.
0:18
So what's the reason to think about translation, quality, and validity of animal research? Well, one important reason is that some of your critics will be thinking about this.
0:33
There is the traditional criticism which you may be familiar with from some of the anti-vivisection organizations, websites, and reports. That's the criticism which is based on general arguments of biological differences between species. This is often anecdotal and not based on systematically collected data or in-depth analysis. And it's published outside mainstream biomedical science journals, often in books or in reports, or pamphlets from the organizations producing the information. More recently, over the last 15 years, a different kind of criticism has appeared which is based on meta-analysis and systematic reviews of large number of data, large amounts of data, and which is published in top biomedical science journals.
1:28
And if you haven't read these papers already, I highly recommend that you'll look them up after this lecture. These are two papers published in two of the top Plos journals, in Plos medicine we've got, "Can animal models of disease reliably inform human studies?" A pretty provocative question. And assisted to that study in Plos biology, "Publication bias in reports of animal stroke studies leads to major overstatement of efficacy." These are two papers which I will come back to, they come out of the CAMARADES group and I will use some of their results later on in this talk. The third paper published in Plos One, "Survey of the quality of experimental design, statistical analysis and reporting of research using animals." If you're familiar with the Arrive guidelines and I hope you are, then this is the paper batch, led to the publication of the Arrive guidelines for how to report research with animals.