AAALAC

If you can see this, no you don't.

Unit 1

Research takes a long time. Years. For example, to make a new drug, one begins with in vitro ("in glass") studies before moving on to pre-clinical trials in lab animals and then finally several rounds of clinical trials in humans.

The research process involves...

1. Defining the question. What does one want to investigate?
2. Formulating an objective framework. Determine a strategy to answer this question.
3. Establishing a hypothesis. What is expected to happen?
4. Creating a research design. Planning this requires knowing how to answer the previous questions.
5. Identifying the variables. These are things that may influence the necessary design.
6. Collecting and analyzing the data.
7. Reporting data and conclusions. This allows for future researchers to know where to start or improve their work. Additional/future questions can be considered here. At this point, this research will be published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Biomedical research, unsurprisingly, is tightly regulated. Funding is obtained from grants, as well as contracts/donations. Grants are pretty hard to get and keep! They cover many things, from salaries to facilities, including per diem animal housing. Many grants come from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Institutes of Health (NIH), but they can even come from the DOD, NASA, USDA, and more, and also from non-profits and private groups. These grants granted to an institution for research are managed by an institution's Office of Research and Grants.

Institutions are regulated and obey things like the Animal Welfare Act (AWA). By federal law, any lab animal use must be approved by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC), and the Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare (OLAW) makes sure institutions are obeying Public Health Service (PHS) Policy.

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