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UCL Celebrates the 3Rs - May 2018

18 May 2018

Members of the biomedical research community gathered in Logan Hall on Wednesday 16th May to celebrate the use of the 3Rs principles to improve animal welfare and enhance scientific outcomes at UCL.

UCL Celebrates the 3Rs - May 2018 Professor David Lomas, Vice-Provost (Health), introduced the day which included speakers from both research and technical backgrounds on enhancements in the 3Rs in their areas. 

Dr James Butler from the Institute of Neurology was awarded the 3Rs Prize for Innovation 2018 for his presentation on 'Automated Training of Rhesus Macaques using Custom-Developed Primate Facial Recognition'. Dr Butler's automated model of training involves a tablet in the home-cage to recognise individual animals and adjust the difficulty or configuration of the training tasks on the tablet accordingly. This benefits both the welfare of the animals and the research by refining the conditions of training for NHPs as well as reducing the amount of time an individual animal is removed from their peer group.

Keynote speeches were delivered by Iain Hrynaszkiewicz from Springer Nature on how transparency can improve research quality and reduce waste in animal research, as well as by Bella Williams from Understanding Animal Research on public engagement with animal research and the 3Rs. Speakers from UCL included Professor Matteo Carandini on examples of the 3Rs from Neuroscience, Dr Giuseppe Ercoli on the use of pig spleens from abattoirs as an alternative research model and Dr Ian Harrison on developing non-invasive imaging models for Alzheimer's Disease.