Director's DiaryBy Alan M. Goldberg, Ph.D. As this issue of the CAAT newsletter goes to press, the American Antivivisection Society (AAVS) has launched its "Antibodies Without Animas" campaign with a press conference at the New York Academy of Sciences on April 23, 1997. Coenraad R.M. Hendriksen, D.V.M., Ph.D., a vaccines researcher at the National Institute of Public Health and the Environment in The Netherlands, and Andrew N. Rowan, Ph.D., director of the Tufts Center for Animals and Public Policy, were two of the panelists who spoke in favor of the campaign. Hendriksen and Rowan are two of the foremost scientists working in the field of alternatives today. Both have received the Humane Society of the United States' Russell and Burch Award for scientific animal protection. An article discussing the AAVS campaign will appear in the next CAAT newsletter. However, I'd like to take this opportunity to review our position on the production of monoclonal antibodies in vivo. Monoclonal antibodies (mAb's) are an important tool in biomedical research with a wide variety of applications. Over the past decade a number of in vitro methodologies have been developed as replacements for the in vivo production of ascites in whole animals. For this reason, in vivo production of mAb's has been prohibited in The Netherlands, Sweden, and Germany. CAAT supports the use of in vitro methodologies as replacements for whole animal use whenever scientifically feasible. If an individual investigator, after a thorough review of the current literature on production of mAb's* and commercially available preparations and kits, still believes it is necessary to produce antibodies in vivo, it is his/her responsibility to present a strongly supported justification of this decision to his/her institutional animal care and use committee (IACUC). The IACUC must then accept or reject this request based upon its own evaluation. As always, CAAT encourages the scientific community to continuously review and revise laboratory practices and procedures as new information and methodologies become available. In the case of in vitro production of monoclonal antibodies, a great deal of progress has occurred over the past few years, and institutions and individual investigators need to be aware of this work and encouraged to make changes wherever and whenever possible. As the new Alternatives to Animal Testing website, with initial funds provided by Procter & Gamble, the National Institutes of Health (Office of Protection from Research Risks), and The Humane Society of the United States, begins to grow, we expect the rapid exchange of such important information to become a much simpler, almost automatic process. We at CAAT are pleased to coordinate this project which will advance the implementation and understanding of replacement, reduction and refinement alternatives throughout the world. * (See newly released AWIC bibliography here). | 
