The end of animal testing

April 30, 2023

Hello 👋 This is Weekend Rounds. Your weekly smorgasbord of veterinary news, bad puns, cute animal pics and free advice.And here's some free advice to get us started: this past week was Veterinary Receptionist Week. Which is great, but if you're not living every week like it's Veterinary Receptionist Week then you need to check yourself before you wreck your practice. Buy them a coffee, thank them daily, and take a moment to appreciate the work they're putting in to keep the operation running. Here's what else we're covering:🌏 2023 World Veterinary Day🧪 The end of animal testing?🚀 Quick hits

Happy (belated) World Veterinary Day! Celebrated on the last Saturday in April each year, the day was started in 2000 by the World Veterinary Association (WVA). Each year, a different theme is chosen to highlight an important topic facing the profession, and acknowledge the significant contributions of veterinarians to society. The 2023 theme is Promoting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusiveness in the Veterinary Profession.

“Embracing the differences means respecting and recognizing everyone, feeling safe, heard, and valued no matter the age, class, ethnicity, gender, health, physical and mental ability, race, sexual orientation, religion, physical size, education level, job level and function, personality traits, or other differences,” the WVA announcement stated.The AVMA celebrated by re-sharing Journey for Teams, a diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) program launched in December 2022 in partnerships with the Veterinary Medical Association Executives (VMAE). We're fans of the program for a few reasons, and we highly encourage everyone to give the 15-minute welcome webinar a shot. At Obi Veterinary Education, we're thrilled to see DEI at the forefront of the conversation this year. Being a force for good in the profession is embedded into the very reason we started Obi, and increasing access to opportunities in the field for underserved communities is a key pillar of that. We're trying to play a small role by contributing to non-profits that make our profession better. But we're always looking to learn how we can do better. Here are a few organizations doing great work to advance DEI that we follow on Instagram and highly recommend you do as well:

Organ on a chip

One innovation that caught our eye this week was the organ-on-a-chip (OOC). And it's exactly what you think it is. Unless you were picturing a potato chip, because then it is not exactly what you thought it was. OOC is a tiny cell culture containing miniature tissues that are grown inside microfluidic chips. To mimic human physiology, the chips are designed to control cell microenvironments and maintain tissue-specific functions - effectively recreating any human organ. Researchers can then introduce drugs to test their efficacy.

Although the technology is focused on human trials, this is big news for the veterinary profession.

As of December 2022, drugs in development no longer have to pass animal tests before moving to human trials in the USA, according to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The news huge for animal right activists, and has kickstarted innovative systems, like OOC, to take the place of the 115 million animals that are tested on every year. And in even better news - there is some evidence that studies using OOC are a more reliable indicator of drug toxicity than animal tests. A study from the end of 2022, demonstrated that a human Liver-Chip from a company called Emulate was able to correctly identify 87% of the tested drugs that caused drug-induced liver injury in patients despite passing animal testing evaluations. Hopefully this is one big step closer toward the end of animal testing entirely.

Here are some stories we're following this week from around the veterinary world and animal kingdom:

How wild animals cope with stress—from overeating to sleepless nights [National Geographic]

AVMF, Purina Pro Plan expand charitable care program to support veterinarians, clients [AVMA]

Animals learn survival tricks from others – even if they live alone [The Conversation]

Big animals move slower than small ones to avoid getting too hot study finds [BBC]