3Rs Research

Industry, politics, research bodies and animal welfare organisations all agree that the reduction of animal experimentation and the improvement of experimental conditions are important goals. More and more efforts are being made to develop alternative methods.

What is 3Rs Research?

The tasks and goals of 3Rs research in overview

Almost seventy years ago two British scientists, zoologist Bill Russell and microbiologist Rex Burch, proposed the ”3Rs” principle as a guideline to alleviating the suffering of lab animals and, hopefully, decreasing or even eliminating animal experimentation:

Following this concept, legislators, industry, research and animal welfare organisations develop and implement alternative and complementary methods throughout the field of animal experimentation. The three main areas of 3Rs research are:

1. Obligatory animal tests required by law e.g. in the approval of pharmaceuticals or chemical substances or the routine testing of vaccines

2. Developing animal-free methods for basic research

3. Teaching and propagating animal-free methods

3Rs Methods

Alternative and complementary methods serve to decrease or eliminate the use of animals and the distress they suffer in experiments. In doing so, these methods must be at least as reliable and representative as conventional experiments. Typical 3Rs methods are

• cell culture, tissue culture or organ culture based

• utilizing organisms at stages of development generally deemed insensitive to pain or distress (e.g. roe, hen’s eggs)

• performed on micro-organisms or invertebrates

• applied directly to human cells or tissue, e.g. human blood

• computer simulations

• geared towards creating less stressful experimental conditions for the animals involved (e.g. through environmental enrichment)

• deploying biochemical or biophysical procedures

In order to be officially acknowledged as EU and OECD experimental guidelines, alternative and complementary methods must undergo international validation studies proving that their reliablity is sufficient to replace current methods presently required by law.

Over the last twenty years, projects backed by several organizations have made considerable advances in this field: A number of alternative methods that completely forgo experiments on live vertebrates have become legal requirements. Improvements in efficiency have optimised some methods which formerly required large numbers of animals. Based on these developments, legal guidelines for several areas of research have been amended, thereby significantly reducing the number of animals used and their distress.

Besides efforts to devise alternatives to mandatory experiments, research for alternative and complementary methods also covers a multitude of non-mandatory animal experiments.