Dear Female Repro AWG Members, @FemaleReproAWG
Here’s a friendly reminder for today’s call at 1pm ET (06/16/2025).
Join us for an exciting session with Dr. Holger Russig (TSE-Systems GmbH, Berlin, Germany), who will be presenting the latest advances in automated intelligent cages, such as IntelliCage and PhenoMaster.
Talk title: “Automated Behavioral and Metabolic Phenotyping of Individual Rodents in a Social Group”
@AnimalAWG @AIMLawg @ALSDAawg @MultiOmicsAWG
“Many promising preclinical studies in rodents fail in clinical trials, raising concerns about the efficacy of classical behavioral, physiological, and metabolic phenotyping approachs to generate novel treatment strategies. Several caveats and limitations play a critical role in this failure, most important: (i) rodents are nocturnal, but mostly tested only briefly and isolated during the light period; (ii) the isolated conventional experiments take only parts of a rich behavioral repertoire under group-housing conditions into consideration; and (iii) environmental factors, as well as experimenter influence are often underestimated. Undisturbed, 24/7 monitoring within environmental and/or social enriched conditions is obtaining increased attention and popularity to substitute and/or complement conventional phenotyping methods. Such strategies in accordance with the 3R (reduce, refine and replace) principles lead to increased animal welfare by reducing stress and data variability. Using different, home-cage phenotyping systems, such as the IntelliCage and the PhenoMaster under group housing conditions lead to a better data reproducibility within and between laboratories. This approach will help to increase the translational value of preclinical behavioral and metabolic research. In addition, experimenter-independent automation of such systems is a pre-requisite for there use in space biology.”