New Universal Protocol Template for IACUC Submissions

By: Galen Cobb
Thursday, February 13, 2025
On January 22, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) hosted a webinar featuring Bill Greer, Assistant Director of Research at the University of Michigan, and faculty of the IACUC Administrators Association (IAA), introducing a Universal Protocol Template (UTP) for researcher submissions to their Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC). This template—the product of a years-long, multi-stakeholder dialogue that included input from NIH Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare (OLAW), the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA)—covers every regulatory IACUC requirement from the Animal Welfare Act (AWA) to Public Health Service (PHS) policy. However, UPT is not formally endorsed or promoted by any federal agency.

In reviewing IACUC forms from across hundreds of institutions, UPT organizers found many require a burdensome level of detail and information redundancies. To reduce the burden on researchers and return researcher time and focus back to their important work, this UTP creates a framework that asks for only the minimum needed disclosures to ensure regulatory compliance.

The UTP follows the 3Rs principle and includes the necessary information for IACUCs to ensure research is being conducted with appropriate consideration to animal welfare, minimizing animal use, and utilizing non-animal alternatives, where possible.

Greer acknowledged the difficulty in getting broad adoption of this universal template due to institutional inertia and differences, but he emphasized that streamlining the IACUC process ultimately promotes the larger institutional goal of supporting researchers.

For more details on UTP, including a complete recording of the webinar and links to the example UTP form, please visit: Advancing Community Engagement by Using a Universal Protocol Template (UPT) | National Academies.