Environmental and lifestyle factors are known to play an important role during gestation, determining newborns' health status and influencing their risk of being subject to certain noncommunicable diseases later in life. In particular, maternal nutritional patterns characterized by a low intake of plant-derived foods could increase the risk of gestation-related issues, such as preeclampsia and pregravid obesity, increase genotoxicant susceptibility, and contribute to the onset of pediatric diseases. In particular, the risk of pediatric wheeze, diabetes, neural tube defects, orofacial clefts, and some pediatric tumors seems to be reduced by maternal intake of adequate amounts of vegetables, fruits, and selected antioxidants. Nevertheless, plant-based diets, like any other diet, if improperly balanced, could be deficient in some specific nutrients that are particularly relevant during gestation, such as n-3 (ω-3) fatty acids, vitamin B-12, iron, zinc, and iodine, possibly affecting the offspring's health state. Here we review the scientific literature in this field, focusing specifically on observational studies in humans, and highlight protective effects elicited by maternal diets enriched in plant-derived foods and possible issues related to maternal plant-based diets.
Improving laboratory animal science and welfare requires both new scientific research and insights from research in the humanities and social sciences. Whilst scientific research provides evidence to replace, reduce and refine procedures involving laboratory animals (the ‘3Rs’), work in the humanities and social sciences can help understand the social, economic and cultural processes that enhance or impede humane ways of knowing and working with laboratory animals. However, communication across these disciplinary perspectives is currently limited, and they design research programmes, generate results, engage users, and seek to influence policy in different ways. To facilitate dialogue and future research at this interface, we convened an interdisciplinary group of 45 life scientists, social scientists, humanities scholars, non-governmental organisations and policy-makers to generate a collaborative research agenda. This drew on methods employed by other agenda-setting exercises in science policy, using a collaborative and deliberative approach for the identification of research priorities. Participants were recruited from across the community, invited to submit research questions and vote on their priorities. They then met at an interactive workshop in the UK, discussed all 136 questions submitted, and collectively defined the 30 most important issues for the group. The output is a collaborative future agenda for research in the humanities and social sciences on laboratory animal science and welfare. The questions indicate a demand for new research in the humanities and social sciences to inform emerging discussions and priorities on the governance and practice of laboratory animal research, including on issues around: international harmonisation, openness and public engagement, ‘cultures of care’, harm-benefit analysis and the future of the 3Rs. The process outlined below underlines the value of interdisciplinary exchange for improving communication across different research cultures and identifies ways of enhancing the effectiveness of future research at the interface between the humanities, social sciences, science and science policy.
20 th century. Relevant techniques include (among others) organson-a-chip (microdevices containing cells and fluids intended to simulate physiological processes in organs); organoids (three-dimensional spheroids containing multiple cell types and intended to simulate physiological processes); high-throughput systems (rapid screening of large numbers of chemicals for biological activity against panels of different cells or biomolecules); induced pluripotent stem cells (adult cells that have been genetically reprogrammed to an embryonic stem cell-like state); and computational modeling (using computation to study the behavior of complex systems).In our view, these methods (and no doubt others in various stages of development) have the potential to replace the use of animals as the default option in both safety testing and biomedical research. That is, these methods will come to comprise the rule, with animal experiments being the exception. This is consistent with Dutch efforts to expeditiously end animal experi- IntroductionThe Principles of Humane Experimental Technique, the landmark book that gave us the 3Rs framework of replacement, reduction, and refinement, turns 60 this year. First published in 1959, Principles was the outcome of a project spearheaded by the Universities Federation for Animal Welfare (UFAW), overseen by a committee that included future Nobel Prize-winning scientist Peter Medawar, and carried out by the British scientists William Russell and Rex Burch (Russell and Burch, 1959). The 3Rs framework helped to inspire and guide humane progress in experimental technique during the second half of the 20 th century and beyond (Stephens and Mak, 2013;Balls et al., 2019).The 60 th anniversary of Principles falls in the midst of substantial developments in non-animal methods, i.e., potential replacement technology. Indeed, scientific experimentation is at the cusp of a new era of techniques hardly imagined in the mid-Food for Thought …
Decades of costly failures in translating drug candidates from preclinical disease models to human therapeutic use warrant reconsideration of the priority placed on animal models in biomedical research. Following an international workshop attended by experts from academia, government institutions, research funding bodies, and the corporate and non-governmental organisation (NGO) sectors, in this consensus report, we analyse, as case studies, five disease areas with major unmet needs for new treatments. In view of the scientifically driven transition towards a human pathways-based paradigm in toxicology, a similar paradigm shift appears to be justified in biomedical research. There is a pressing need for an approach that strategically implements advanced, human biology-based models and tools to understand disease pathways at multiple biological scales. We present recommendations to help achieve this.
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