Share thisEconomic pressures are driving the trend towards increased optimization of drug discovery and development processes. Research organizations are pushing animal researchers to increase throughput without a concomitant increase in staff, making the job of the animal researcher more demanding than ever. It is surprising that in most institutions, in vivo studies are still conducted and managed much in the same way as they were 20 or 30 years ago, using a combination of manual data collection methods such as loose-leaf sheets, scientific notebooks, and electronic spreadsheets such as Microsoft Excel. This is due to the complexity of automating the highly variable animal study processes.
Toxicology studies conducted in compliance with Good Laboratory Practices (GLP) regulations were the first studies to be automated as their designs and endpoints tend to be more standardized in nature and less prone to frequent mid-course changes than other non-GLP toxicology and pharmacology studies. Animal research has been historically isolated and programmers with domain expertise in study conduct are uncommon. Advances in programming tools, computer processing speed and memory have, in recent years, decreased development costs and increased the technical possibilities. Significant benefits may now be achieved by automating the processes of data collection, study design, task management, analysis, graphing, results storage, and dissemination and report generation. The recent advent of commercially available in vivo study software programs for cancer studies affords the animal research community with powerful new tools to improve the quality, integrity, accessibility, accuracy, comparability, search-ability, speed, and efficiency of animal studies.
Manual Data Collection Problems
Most research institutions currently manage in vivo tumor studies using a combination of manual methods; recording data into a study notebook, on loose-leaf pages, or into a spreadsheet program such as Excel®. In many institutions, data collection requires two technicians; one to measure and a second to record results. Typically only one type of data, (such as body weight, tumor volume, or clinical observations), is collected at a time requiring multiple manipulations of the same animals. Data is typically then entered into the spreadsheet program. This requires both a high degree of data manipulation and a thorough understanding of the statistics and program functionality to perform even basic analyses. Expert Excel® users can create very useful custom macros to perform desired statistical tests for more standardized study types. Yet, even standardized studies frequently vary the number of groups and group sizes as well as the nature or type of comparator (positive or negative control) groups, requiring the technician to “tweak” the data and or macro for each study.