NCI-Bethesda Animal Care and Use Committee

Laboratory Animal Sciences Program

ALTERNATIVES SEARCH

According to the Animal Welfare Act regulations, "the ACUC shall determine that the principal investigator has considered alternatives to procedures that may cause more than slight pain or distress to the animals, and has provided a written narrative of the methods and sources used to determine that alternatives were not available." The ACUC is also responsible for ensuring that the proposed research does not unnecessarily duplicate other research. To assist the ACUC with this task, the PI is required to conduct a literature search when proposing to utilize regulated species in studies that propose procedures that may cause more than momentary pain or distress to animals. The PI is required to provide the ACUC with the following information under Section G of the NCI Animal Study Proposal form for these studies: the name of minimum two databases used to search for alternatives, the date of your search, the period covered, the keywords that were used, and a brief narrative of the results.

The following sites are designed to assist you with this endeavor:

Agricola

ALTBIB: Bibliography on Alternatives to the Use of Live Vertebrates in Biomedical Research and Testing

ALTWEB

Animal Welfare Institute

AWIC Alternatives and Database Searching

Developmental Studies Hybridoma Bank (University of Iowa)

Johns Hopkins Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing

IACUC.org

ICCVAM (The Interagency Coordinating Committee on the Validation of Alternative Methods)

Invitroderm

Multicentre Evaluation of In Vitro Cytotoxicity