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Burgeoning animal populations in US research facilities are threatening valuable animal disease models, warns the country's National Research Council (NRC). It is therefore calling for an expansion of animal holding capacity.

The NRC report Biomedical Models and Resources says overcrowding is posing a grave threat to the health and preservation of disease models. This overcrowding, says the report, is due to exploding populations of transgenic and knockout mice, the increased use of animals in research generally, and increased inter-institutional traffic and declining health surveillance. These factors have created “dry tinder for devastating [infectious disease outbreaks] among irreplaceable animal colonies”.

As a result, the council is calling “urgently” for funding of new building to expand animal-holding capacity in research institutions, and for specialized buildings — such as the biocontainment facilities used in infectious disease research — that could be shared between researchers at different institutions.

“There's a desperate need for increased animal breeding space,” says Muriel Davisson, director of genetic resources at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, and chair of the panel that wrote the report. She urges that the fundamental need for space, diagnostic support and training should not “get lost in the glamour of specific animal models”.

The report, compiled for the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), was released at a meeting of the NCRR's Advisory Council last month. Its six authors surveyed more than 70 investigators at NIH and elsewhere in compiling their recommendations, which are intended to help long-term planning at NCRR, the key supporter of animal research facilities through the NIH.

The NCRR director, Judith Vaitukaitis, calls the report — which also made recommendations on animal use ranging from training of scientists to cryopreservation of animal model embryos — “very thoughtful”. She adds that the magnitude of the problem is immense and “going to get much worse.”

Anecdotal evidence points to several causes for the crisis, says the report. For example, increasing mouse populations since 1980 have swollen animal numbers far beyond the level for which institutions were prepared. Also, the upgrading of standards for animal-holding facilities decreases the amount of space institutes can provide for each dollar. And animals are increasingly being shared by investigators at different institutions, so the risk of disease transmission has become greater at a time when there are declining funds for testing for subclinical diseases. “Our laboratory animal infectious disease guard appears to be down,” the report says.

Vaitukaitis says that, as a first step in responding to the situation, the NCRR is planning to establish regional centres for receiving, cryopreserving and distributing animals in the west, midwest and south of the United States. These centres would also develop specialties, for instance in models for cancer, or immunology-related research. The centres would complement the northeast's Jackson Laboratory, a unique facility that selects, cryopreserves, maintains and distributes genetically engineered mice. Such specialized centres, it is hoped, would ensure clean animal stocks.

Elsewhere, Vaitukaitis plans to focus money on training veterinarians to carry out molecular genetics, with the aim of getting them to instruct other investigators who treat animals like “four legged test-tubes”, she says.

But NCRR's ability to deal with a national-scale problem remains limited, despite the hefty 13.4 per cent increase proposed in President Bill Clinton's 1999 budget plan. The centre's $108 million 1999 budget for all work on animal disease models and facilities contains just $7.8 million for improvement of animal facilities — merely 1.5 per cent of the total proposed spending on NCRR for 1999. Within a separate, $20 million programme for general research construction, NCRR is seeing a steady rise in applications for funds to upgrade and enlarge animal facilities, primarily for holding knockout and transgenic mice.

Vaitukaitis says, nonetheless, that NCRR's aim remains to “significantly increase the current capacity” for animals in the nation's research facilities. Another goal, she says, is “to keep working with investigators out there to make sure we're responsive to the roadblocks that they see”.