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Animal number versus maximum tumour volume: an example of reduction and refinement trade-off in the 3Rs

Lab Animal volume 51, pages 208–209 (2022)Cite this article

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To the Editor — The 3Rs - Replacement, Refinement, Reduction - are well established guiding principles, outlined by Russel and Burch in 19591, applied in animal research to improve animal welfare when no alternative to animal use is available. Extensions of the 3Rs to ensure scientific validity have been suggested. Examples are the additional 3Rs - Robustness, Registration and Reporting - of Strech and Dirnagl2, and the 3Vs - construct, internal and external Validity - of Würbel3. The internal consistency and compatibility of these principles for animal welfare and scientific validity have been recently evaluated by Eggel and Würbel4 who note that reduction and refinement are the only two components amongst the 3Vs and 3Rs where conceptual conflicts exist.

The purposes of reduction and refinement are respectively to use the minimum number of animals necessary in order to achieve scientific endpoints as well as to minimise the negative experience animals will undergo during research projects (https://www.nc3rs.org.uk/the-3rs). These aims are interdependent and can oppose each other: Refining a humane endpoint may require increasing the number of animals needed to reach the scientific endpoints. Decreasing the number of animals may require lowering the experimental animal’s quality of life by pushing the humane endpoint to achieve the same level of precision. Known examples of conflicts between these two principles are the use of longitudinal (instead of cross-sectional) studies, the re-use of animals, and the amount of information collected for each animal4,5,6.

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Fig. 1: Power analysis, effect size and results.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Dr. Davina Honess at CRUK – Cambridge Institute for her valuable suggestions which helped improve the letter as well as the Carroll group at CRUK – Cambridge Institute for providing the raw data of Mohammed et al.7 used to derive the scenario considered in our power analysis.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Cancer Research UK - Cambridge Institute, Li Ka Shing Centre, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom

    Dominique-Laurent Couturier

  2. Medical Research Council Biostatistics Unit, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom

    Dominique-Laurent Couturier

  3. University Biomedical Services, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom

    Henri G. M. J. Bertrand

  4. Agenda Veterinary Services, Hull, United Kingdom

    Henri G. M. J. Bertrand

Authors
  1. Dominique-Laurent Couturier
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  2. Henri G. M. J. Bertrand
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Correspondence to Dominique-Laurent Couturier or Henri G. M. J. Bertrand.

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Lab Animal thanks Karen Blyth, Florian Frommlet and Romain-Daniel Gosselin for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Couturier, DL., Bertrand, H.G.M.J. Animal number versus maximum tumour volume: an example of reduction and refinement trade-off in the 3Rs. Lab Anim 51, 208–209 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41684-022-01006-y

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