Share thisIn 2007 I joined a publicly traded biotechnology company as their vivarium and operations manager. The lab had eight animal holding rooms with a total cage capacity of approximately 2,000 cages, with IVC dual-ventilated racks. The facility had a traditional washroom supported by a boiler, tunnel washer, rack washer, and bulk autoclaves. Key to the research were several lines of sensitive transgenic animals, which were bred in-house. The breeding program was well established and produced very consistent, predictable results.
A neighboring tenant in our research park introduced us to disposable caging. They had been successfully operating their facility without a cage wash operation. While the reduction in costs and operational burden were attractive, we were hesitant to change given the importance of the animal program to our core science mission.
However, we were facing a dilemma. The cage wash in this facility was very old and failing. The boiler also needed replacing. The initial cost estimates were staggering. Worse was that the construction was going to require a minimum of five months, during which time our breeding operation would be in jeopardy. Faced with this situation I garnered the support of the scientific staff to compare a leading disposable IVC caging system with the washable IVC caging system we were using at that time. If our animals would breed in these cages, perhaps we could use them during the renovation period.
To perform the comparison we placed one disposable rack and one traditional rack next to one another in the same room and controlled for other variables such as bedding, water, feed, and enrichment. We monitored for pregnancies and “good mothers”—defined as those mothers that successfully wean their pups. During this experiment the health status of the animals were evaluated by the animal care technicians, our scientists, and me on a daily basis. We were astonished by the results. We had hoped the cages would perform as well as the cages we had been using for the past 18 months so we could consider the disposable cages as an alternative to building a cage wash.