THE USE OF RUMINANTS FOR BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH IN PERINATALOGY

Abstract

As a consequence of obvious ethical considerations concerning what is feasible or not in the field of human biomedical research, animal models are of critical importance both for human and veterinary medicine and cognitive scientists. Many species have been and are currently used as animal models. Rodents and lagomorphs are the most popular, essentially because of their low cost, handling and rearing facilities, limited ethical impact, and the availability of a wide range of genetic research tools in these species. Nevertheless, these models present some limitations. The physiological mechanisms observed in these species might be far from those of humans. For example, due to the large number of embryos and short gestation length, rodents and lagomorphs are not very suitable in several fields of perinatal research. Large animal species are required when surgical approaches or new medical devices have to be evaluated. The pig is widely used in these situations, as well as ruminants such as the sheep and the goat. Concerning physiological, anatomical and genetic considerations, large primates could be considered as the “gold standard” animal model because of their important similarities with humans. However, their use for biomedical research is greatly limited by their behavioral and social organization, raising important ethical questions, and their elevated cost. A very large number of experiments using ruminants as animal models have been published. A rapid bibliometric analysis performed using the Pubmed database from 1969 to 2010 retrieved 1108 literature reviews using the Mesh keywords “ruminant & animal model”. Six hundred and twelve references were available only for the year 2009 using the same Mesh research and covering all types of publications. The sheep is the most widely used ruminant model, and no less than 5393 publications can be found using the Mesh keywords “sheep & animal model”. The current presentation will focus on the most outstanding examples of great biomedical advances carried out with ruminant as models in the field of perinatal research. In this paper, the pivotal role of ruminants in the evaluation and development of new pharmacological treatments, new invasive procedures in fetuses, gestational imaging and genetic approaches will be developed, with their clinical context, including our own work on feto-placental imaging and the assessment of placental blood flow using quantitative 3D Doppler.