Beagles are used in medical research to test the safety of new medicines the
Beagles are kept together in pairs or small groups in pens they are let out of
their pens for regular exercise dogs are only occasionally used in medical
research most research is done with mice rats and zebrafish with dogs making up
less than one in a thousand of the animals used for research but
dogs are needed to test the safety of new medicines and for research into
conditions such as muscular dystrophy the reason why beagles as opposed to
other varieties of dog are used is largely an accident of history beagles
are fairly small and easily managed - and these dogs have been used in an
experiment? These dogs are on study currently and it's their time
for exercise. They seem very happy coming out and running up and down the
corridors and saying hello to everybody. Yes they are. When a potential new medicine is
being tested in animals researchers need to be able to tell whether the drug is
causing any unwanted side effects this is done by measuring the drugs' effect on
the body while the dog is alive and by studying the dog's tissues after the dog
is humanely killed. Where do the dogs come from for this research? The dogs
are all purpose bred for research and they come from licensed
breeding establishments. In the last group as well there were two people with
five dogs it seems quite a an intensive sort of human to dog ratio, is that usual
that normal? Yeah, we would normally have one or two technicians, we would never leave the
dogs on unsupervised. So here we've got some dogs that are going to be
acclimatized to jackets so this for a jacketed external inflammatory energy study
we've got an under jacket that will be placed under the dog and then an over
jacket. I can see the dog has been shaved there in a couple of places, is that so that
there is something's going next to the skin? Yes so we can put the pads on for the
readings, the telemetry readings. There are many different ways of taking
medical measurements with animals and researchers have worked hard to make
this as comfortable as possible for the animals. So this is the under jacket
the technicians will just reach each leg through, through the leg holes. Technical
innovations now allow measurements to be taken by instruments that are outside
the animal's body in this case the measurements are taken through a jacket
so using the jacket means that the animal can be free-roaming in its pen
and there's no surgical techniques needed. The dog would be free to
move around in its pen with its pen-mate. How long do they wear the
jackets for when they are used to them? So it depends on the design but normally
up to a day. The collar is just going on last there and that
is so the animal doesn't turn around and start nibbling out the jacket and pull
it off which could interfere with the experiment so is the first time this
dog has been used in research? So where we can where the study allows we
will reuse animals after a period where they've not had any procedures done to
them. This dog has been used previously
These dogs have already taken part in medical trials and will take part in
testing new medicines again.
The advantage of automatic monitoring is that the dogs can be left to live as
usual and do not have to be picked up and restrained for medical measurements
without research with dogs we could never have made the breakthroughs that
led to insulin for diabetes, drugs for heart disease and organ transplants
treatments that have saved countless human lives.