LABORATORY ANIMAL CARE IN CLINICAL SETTINGS AND PAIN ASSESSMENT

General part:
Animal care, health and management in clinical settings. Methods for marking individual animals.
Basic concept of laboratory animal health status assessment and introduction to diseases of laboratory animals.
Humane animal handling and restraint. Clinical examination and welfare assessment. Drugs and fluids administration. Blood sampling (blood volume, techniques, equipment preparation, anatomical landmarks).
Elements of biomedical imaging (X-Ray, ultrasound, MRI, CT, PET).
Concepts of laboratory animals’ anaesthesia and emergencies.
Anaesthesia for minor procedures. Anaesthesia for prolonged procedures (grater than 15 minutes).
Record-keeping: data sheet, score sheet design, observation sheet, clinical score, severity assessment sheet, practical use of score sheet.
Severity of procedures, severity classification system and action to take.
Humane endpoints and humane methods of euthanasia.
Notes of occupational health and safety when working with laboratory animals.

Surgery:
The course will focus on basic surgical principles and procedures.
Principles of surgical asepsis; sterilization of surgical equipment; surgical facilities and equipment; care and maintenance of the surgical environment; preparation of the surgical patient and the operating team; surgical instruments; suture materials; removal of suture or wound clips. Basic operative techniques. Principles of wound and tissue healing. Common post-surgical complications and their causes. Planning of surgical procedures. Principles of post-surgical care, nursing and monitoring. Examples of surgical models.

Pain assessment:
Minimizing pain and distress in clinical settings. Specie specific recognition and management of pain, suffering and distress : laboratory rodents, rabbit, small ruminants, pigs and other animals used in scientific research. Clinical application of the pain scales. Pain management in laboratory animals. Practical assessment of pain/suffering in lab animals (by the use of pictures, videos and interactive activities).

In vivo preclinical studies and in vitro alternative methods:
General concepts on in vivo methodologies used for pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamics studies; drug discovery and development; preclinical and clinical investigations, particularly referring to acute and chronic toxicity studies, mutagenesis, carcinogenesis, and reproductive toxicology; basic concepts on alternative in vitro methods and their use in pharmaco-toxicological investigations.

Practical activities:
- demonstration of procedures/techniques and interactive discussion of clinical cases, in-class session of pain assessment in different species, meeting with experts in laboratory animal medicine. Practical skills will be developed on simulators and cadavers (8 hours);
- lab session on surgical instruments, basic surgical techniques, and preparation of the surgical patient and the surgical team (8 hours);
- genotyping nuclear receptors (nucleic acid extraction from blood/tissue; execution qPCR assay; result evaluation and phenotypic consequences); draft of a pharmaco-toxicological experimental protocol; critical reading of an article focusing on experimental pharmaco-toxicology (8 hours).