Are happy lab animals better for science?

Being a lab animal might actually make you
less useful for experiments.
Research animals tend to become obese,
have weak immune systems,
and are more susceptible to cancer--
and that’s before the experiments begin.
Only one in nine drugs that work on lab animals
ever succeeds in human clinical trials,
and labs often struggle to reproduce
each others’ results.
We don’t treat these animals like humans.
We don’t give them the variety of life that people have.
And some people are saying that’s why these drugs
are not translating to people.
And so the question is: Is the environment
we house these animals in the problem?
Lab animals typically live in barren conditions:
a small plastic box, few if any companions,
and that’s about it.
And there’s a reason for this.
For decades, scientists thought that the smaller
the number of variables--keeping variety to a minimum--
the more repeatable the experiments
and the stronger the results.
But growing research suggests that this approach
may have backfired.
Some researchers are pushing to enrich the lives
of the creatures in their care and experiments
are starting to show that such enrichments
not only benefit animals, but science as well.
In 2000, reearchers in Australia added a bunch of
enrichments to mouse cages.
So, things like colored balls,
cardboard to chew on and play with.
And what they found was that these mice
were much less likely develop symptoms
of a Huntington's-like disease
than mice housed in much more standard,
barren caging.
Before this work, everyone thought
Huntington’s was 100% genetic.
The team has gone on to show similar results
in rodent models of Autism, Alzheimer’s
and depression.
A few years ago, researchers at Ohio State
developed what the lead researcher’s daughter called
“Disneyland for Mice.”
The reason she called it this was
this was a very large mouse enclosure.
And it had all these things that you don’t find
in a standard mouse cage.
And what they found is that mice that lived
in this environment were 80% less likely to develop
certain cancers than mice housed in
the much more standard housing.
A stimulating environment seemed to activate
the mouse’s hypothalamus,
a region of the brain known to affect
everything from mood to cancer proliferation.
There’s some skepticicism out there about enrichment.
First off all there’s the concern
about cost and resources.
And researchers worry about
compromising the reproducibility
from experiment to experiment.
Yes, maybe they’ll make animals happier
but they’re not gooing to have any big impact
on the translatability of drugs that work
in these types of animals to drugs that work in people.
To provide hard science on the effects of enrichment,
an unusual program at the University of Michigan
called “REAL” is determining which enrichments work
and don’t work for various lab animals
and then systematically exploring
how research results are affected.
If we can give them companions to live with,
toys to interact with,
puzzles to solve--
Then they are going to physiologically be a lot more
like wild animals rather than these
what some people think
are these very kind of unnatural systems in the lab.
As the researchers dig for answers to these questions,
one day we may see lab animals in enriched conditions
as a rule rather than the exception--
for both the sake of science
and the animals themselves.
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Are happy lab animals better for science?

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