Our annual Summer Fun Day is always a great opportunity to celebrate the fantastic community we have built at the Mary Lyon Centre through silly games and friendly competition. This year, we also awarded the inaugural Jo Peters Awards for Excellence & Innovation in Animal Research and officially opened our new multi-use games area, named Ade’s Pitch, in honour of our former colleague, Ade Elsley.
The Jo Peters Awards are a new internal prize supported by Mouse News Letter to recognise and reward MLC staff for efforts that go above and beyond in two categories: Addressing the 3Rs (the replacement, reduction, and refinement of the use of animals in research) and Long-Term Innovation. The awards are named in honour of Jo Peters, a former colleague who sadly passed away last year.
The establishment of these awards demonstrates our commitment to the continuous development of improvements that allow us to reduce the number of animals needed to answer a research question and to refine procedures such that they minimise the impact on the animals, as well as our commitment to recognise the efforts of our staff at all levels. We received many nominations for staff across the centre, but there could only be two winners, who were chosen by a Mouse News Letter panel of experts.
Chrissy Thompson, Compliance and Training Manager at the MLC, won in the 3Rs category for her work to refine the oral gavage procedure. Oral gavage is a standard procedure for delivering precise liquid doses directly into the stomach via a specialised tube. Chrissy purchased and optimised new gavage tubes that have significantly improved both the efficiency and reliability of the technique, leading to a marked increase in technician confidence when performing the procedure. Importantly, this refinement has had a clear and measurable welfare benefit for the animals, with no adverse effects associated with the procedure reported since the introduction of the improved technique.
Tilly Passmore, a member of our Data Management Team, won in the Long-Term Innovation category for her work to refine data generation. Following a push to up-tech the centre, Tilly proactively approached and engaged with the in vivo project management team to work on improving scheduling systems and how experimental pipelines are tracked to enable earlier identification of small inconsistencies that might otherwise introduce variability into datasets. Reducing variability and increasing standardisation leads to more consistent and reliable data that reduces the number of animals required to achieve meaningful results. Importantly, this isn’t only a more streamlined operation, as it’s underpinned by an aim to improve animal welfare by reducing unnecessary intervention and to enable animal technicians to focus more on animal care rather than administrative burden.
Chrissy and Tilly received their awards, which feature a design based on the Mouse News Letter logo, from long-time friend of MRC Harwell, Lizzy Fisher, alongside the official opening of our new multi-use games area, Ade’s Pitch. Ade Elsley was a long-serving colleague in our Estates & Engineering team who oversaw the design and build of both the Mary Lyon Centre and the new Advance Training Centre. Ade sadly passed away 4 years ago.
