As of the end of May, the experimental animal management system jointly developed by the Experimental Animal Management Committee and the IT Service Center has run smoothly for six months, with over 8,000 users in 68 research groups university-wide.
Experimental animals are important supporting resources for research in the fields of life sciences and medicine. As the university is advancing rapidly in the research of life science and the integration of multidisciplines, the importance of the Animal Core Facility, a university-wide public service platform of experimental animals, has become increasingly prominent. In addition to the platform infrastructure, the Facility can provide researchers with efficient, convenient, one-stop, and all-round services related to experimental animals, and promote an easily-accessible system for the information tracking of animal experiments.
The experimental animal management system was launched in December, 2022, and its initial stage has functioned to facilitate the online application and approval of services such as training courses, affairs of experimental animal ethics, animal cages, ordering of animals, biological purification, embryo/gamete cryopreservation and recovery. The system is also connected to the university’s financial system to facilitate the unified external payment of animal ordering and online billing, so that the payment and reimbursement process can be simplified. Moreover, an information sharing directory of mouse resources is embedded in the system for users to query the mouse strains they need, thereby reducing wasted resources.
In the six months that the system has been operating, approval and payment for more than 900 online orders have been completed, and 61 issues related to experimental animal ethics have been submitted through the system for online review. The ethical issues that have been approved offline can also be uploaded to the system for further online processing, thus ensuring a smooth switch from offline to online.
The launch of the experimental animal management system has improved the efficiency of the management and service of the Facility. The users can know the processing progress of various affairs and animal feeding conditions on the system at any time. This facilitates a comprehensive process of supervision in animal experiments from ethical issue application to its implementation. At the same time, the management of experimental animals by digital platform is an application expansion of campus informatization, and this will further demonstrate the critical role that informatization plays in innovation and development of the campus.