In this course you will gain a deep understanding of the impact of animal research on human health(care). The role of animal research in e.g. drug development and toxicology is controversial: it is both championed as essential and criticised as unethical and ineffective. Bear in mind that the ethical justification of animal studies critically relies on their expected contribution to improving human health; an expectation which is often unmet. Most therapies showing promising results in animals fail to translate to patients in terms of efficacy or safety. For instance, despite successful testing in animals, up to 85% of early clinical trials for novel drugs fail! Thus, translating animal data to humans is apparently not an easy task. How can the value of necessary animal studies be maximized?
 
In this course you will investigate the possible causes of translational failure when translating results from animal studies to humans. You will learn how to signal and prevent a variety of important limitations, biases and systematic failures in the use of animals as models for human disease. We will cover aspects of construct validity, internal validity, external validity, reporting quality, meta-research and we will discuss non-animal alternatives to animal models. You will work on case studies from disease areas such as stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, spinal cord injury, renal failure, MI and cancer. After this course you will be equipped to assess the quality and robustness of an individual animal study, as well asa set of animal studies. Furthermore, you will have the knowledge needed to optimize the experimental setup of future animal studies.  
 
If you’d like to know more, or find out if this minor is right for you, please email your questions to kim.wever@radboudumc.nl
Key words
Animal research, synthesis of evidence, translational research, impact on health care.