POET Responses to OSU Comments Concerning Spinal Cord Injuries Techniques Course

The Ohio State University writes:

Thank you for your note expressing your concerns over a training course being offered this summer at Ohio State University. We hope that the following facts will help to correct any misinformation you might have received.

• The National Institutes of Health, through the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, selected Ohio State as the site for a short, three-week course it sponsors to train researchers on a highly effective and humane method of inducing spinal injuries in laboratory animals;
  

No matter how reproducible, quantifiable or statistically significant the rodent model may get, it will never model the human SCI condition in a clinically important manner. Teaching students to produce an established model in a rote fashion again and again will do little to help seriously injured people. Students should be trained to think of new ways to contribute experimental knowledge to the problem that move away from clearly flawed animal models.

• The course is being offered to professional scientists who are already active in this area of research. This is not an academic course for our conventional students, nor is it an offered course in our curricula;

The application form for this course lists four areas of education to check: undergraduate, graduate, post graduate, post-doctoral, as well section V reads: Students and post-doctoral trainees include a signature or statement from a mentor who is supporting your work.

Being “active in this area research” should provide an opportunity to shadow the mentor or others currently involved in this research. A more realistic alternative to this course.

• Participants will be taught to surgically reproduce spinal cord injury with a minimum of pain and distress to the animals. All procedures are performed under deep anesthesia and pain is minimized by use of analgesics. Animals recover quickly and return to a state of good health, despite the injury;

The reproductions via the techniques taught in this course do not reflect human spinal cord injuries. Laminectomy itself is one of the problems with the rodent model. The process of removing the protective tissues and systems before injury removes the possibility of mirroring all the pathologic changes that are a consequence of accidental spinal cord injury.

Instructors state they will “check for pain” twice per day. This is not adequate. The types of behavioral exercises the animals will be forced to complete will clearly be distressing. Forced swimming and other exercises for 45 minutes at a time will introduce emotional distress.

Recent research indicates that even routine laboratory procedures such as subcutaneous injection and investigator handling results in demonstrable stress index increases that can affect experimental protocols, and certainly affect the well- being of the animals.

• As more researchers adopt this standardized research technique in their studies, it is likely that the numbers of animals used may be reduced below the already low numbers currently used;

The animal numbers could already be reduced by using video or by simply stating the differences in genetics strains, male and female differences, and between Sprague Dawley and Long Evans rats. This modification could reduce animal numbers by 15%.

• The course was approved by the university’s Institutional Laboratory Animal Care and Use Committee and will be run in accord with both university guidelines and those of the National Institutes of Health;

Any course or experiment using animals at OSU must be approved by the ILACUC. However approval does not indicate scientifically justified or ethical research. An example would be approval of the “cats on meth” protocol.

• While substantial progress has been made using research methods involving tissue cultures, there is currently no adequate alternative to the use of laboratory animals in understanding completely the cellular damage following spinal cord injury, or the biochemical processes involved in the recovery from such injuries.

Alternatives to the course include shadowing the principal investigator in their lab, the use mechanical models or rat cadavers. As well studies using human-derived cell lines, human-based models, clinical observations and trials, and cadaver material from spinal cord injury patients have contributed greatly to understanding the mechanics of human spinal cord injuries and the effects of trauma on the cellular and molecular levels.