Highlights from 2025 Conferences
This poster was presented at the Federation of European Laboratory Animal Science Associations (FELASA) Congress. FELASA is a key event for the laboratory animal science community, offering a platform for sharing advancements in animal welfare, model development, and responsible research practices.
Scroll through the poster below, or download to learn more.
Julie Torvund-Jensen1, Ganesh Karunakaran2, Simon Nørgaard Laursen1, Jens Christian Laursen1
1 Taconic Biosciences A/S, Denmark
2 Taconic Biosciences, Inc.
As a leading provider of rodent models, Taconic is committed to upholding animal welfare best practices for our animals while offering the best solutions to our customers. The AWARE™ (Animal Welfare Aligning with Resource Efficiency) Program demonstrates our dedication to drive awareness of animal welfare. The AWARE™ Program empowers our staff and researchers in the scientific community to proactively plan, execute, and monitor breeding projects. With the AWARE™ Program, Taconic ensures that projects are designed to fulfill the scientific needs of the research project while maintaining a keen eye on animal welfare. Launching this program is a key step in creating an industry-leading framework guiding the monitoring of animal welfare observations, animal utilization, and adverse phenotypes.
The AWARE™ Program consists of two main pillars that are closely related (Figure 1):
The Design & Planning arm considers best practices, preventive measures, and the 3Rs in every colony managed at Taconic. The goal is to ensure animal model production levels are closely regulated based on demand.
The Monitoring & Reporting arm, where the focus is defining appropriate performance indicators, monitoring thresholds, and animal utilization metrics. This maximizes resource efficiency and reduces the number of animals needed.
Fig 1: The AWARE™ Program consists of a design & planning element and a monitoring & reporting element. Combined, these elements ensure that projects are planned and executed, focusing on animal welfare and resource efficiency.
The AWARE™ Scorecard (Figure 2) is one of the customer-facing elements of the AWARE™ program. For every colony management project at Taconic, projects are scored within four categories: Animal Utilization, Pain and Distress, Genetic Integrity, and Adverse Phenotype.
The scorecard aims to ensure transparent communication with the community and identify project elements that can be optimized during the project planning phase. The score does not reflect whether a project is considered good or bad; instead, it is a tool to inform the investigator about key project animal welfare metrics.
Fig 2: The AWARE™ scorecard is designed as an "A" with colored triangles representing each of the four categories of the AWARE™ scoring system: Animal Utilization, Pain and Distress, Genetic Integrity, and Adverse Phenotype. Project scores will be shown in the corresponding triangles.
Since the beginning of 2022, all new and active colony management projects have been scored according to the scorecard (Figure 3). For new projects, AWARE™ scoring is performed in the project planning phase to ensure that the proposed plan is optimized within the scoring system's categories.
Based on "Genetic Integrity" AWARE™ scores, opportunities for improving genetic compliance were identified in several projects, resulting in "genetic refreshes" being performed. This reduces the long-term animal wastage as it mitigates the risk of integrating spontaneous mutations in the background genome. Overall, this leads to better study reproducibility.
For projects with an Adverse Phenotype score of 3, animal care technicians receive images and/or videos of expected phenotypes. This helped them manage models with adverse phenotypes more efficiently.
Taconic's Sales Inventory Operations Planning (SIOP) process ensures that animal production levels are set based on demand and that only the animals needed to supply critical research are produced. This allowed us to reduce the overproduction of animals in our commercial production colonies and improve the Avoidable Discards to Sales ratio.
Fig 3: Since early 2022, AWARE™ scoring has been included in all new project plans. In June 2022, Taconic started the process of reviewing all existing colony management projects to give them AWARE™ scores. This effort was completed in 2023.
By implementing the AWARE™ program, Taconic has successfully:
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