Event

PSI Pre-Clinical SIG Webinar: Therioepistemology - Rethinking how we conduct animal-based experimentation

Date: Tuesday 4th October 2022
Time: 14:00-15:00 BST | 15:00-16:00 CEST
Speaker: Brianna Gaskill (Novartis)

Who is this event intended for? Colleagues working in in-vivo research.
What is the benefit of attending? Attendees have the opportunity to learn how knowledge can be gained from animal research. 

Registration

You can now register for this event. Registration fees are as follows:
- Members of PSI = Free of charge
- Non-Members of PSI = Free of charge
To register for the session, please click here.

Overview

In recent years,  the scientific community has finally become more generally aware of the current reproducibility and translatability crisis. Some of this awareness has come from the recent NIH initiative on “Enhancing rigor, transparency, and translatability in animal research” starting a paradigm shift around certain themes. This shift can be characterized at the micro level as a shift from asking “what have we controlled for in this model?” to asking “what have we chosen to ignore in this model, and at what cost?” At the macro level, it is a shift from viewing animals as tools (the furry test tube), to viewing them as patients in an equivalent human medical study, this includes providing for an animals welfare as well as experimental design and analysis techniques. Colleagues and I feel that we are witnessing the birth of a new discipline, which we have termed Therioepistemology, or the study of how knowledge is gained from animal research. In this talk, I’ll outline six questions that help critically evaluate animal-based biomedical research from a therioepistemological perspective. Ultimately, by formalizing therioepistemology as a discipline, we can begin to discuss best practices that will improve the reproducibility and translatability of animal-based research, with concomitant benefits in terms of human health, animal well-being, and scientific quality.

Speaker details

Speaker

Biography

BriannaeditBrianna Gaskill, PhD
Novartis

Brianna received her BS from Kansas State University and PhD in Animal Behavior and Well-being from Purdue University. She completed a postdoctoral position at Charles River after graduation, then returned to Purdue as a faculty member in 2014 and was awarded tenure in 2020. Her research has focused on developing new animal welfare assessment methodologies, rodent well-being, and elucidating the scientific impact of welfare problems in animal based research. She recently started a new position at Novartis as their 3Rs scientist where she will work closely with disease area scientists to apply 3Rs strategies to improve animal welfare and drug discovery. Her research contributions have been acknowledged by receiving awards from the NC3R’s, the Swiss Laboratory Animal Science Association, and the International Society for Applied Ethology.

 

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