More scientific progress??

As previously posted, I am working against the clock to finish rebuttal experiments for the review we received from the Journal of Immunology for my 4th and final dissertation publication.

We are on our way feeding Dr. Z's knockout mice our super-special experimental diet. Par for the course, these mice will be ready for their experiment the last week of May, which is the week I plan on taking my RD boards and right before we are going to CO for the PNIRS conference. I am still debating on whether I might let them stay on the diet a week longer until we return - stay tuned.

The other major experiment the reviewers wanted was to see if our super-special diet would protect mice against sepsis. This required us to write a whole new experimental protocol to preform a sepsis experiment. Since sepsis is a controversial procedure, there was not doubt that this would require a full review from Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC), and the full committee only meets on the 1st Tuesday of the month.

The week following the journal review (March 16th) I met with vets and IACUC staff to obtain some help with writing such a controversial protocol. I also found out that it would be in our best interest to submit our new protocol by Friday, March 20th or Monday the 23rd at the latest; leaving me only a few days to write a whole new animal protocol (not easy at all!!). I worked, via email, with the IACUC specialists for a few more changes and pored over the protocol night and day and submitted on Monday, March 23rd (assuming we would be on the agenda for review on April 7th).

March 25th - we received a pre-review with some small changes. "Mark this box, change this verb."

March 29th - we received notice that we were called to full committee review, which was no surprise.

April 10th - we received an email with reviewers' comments asking to clarify some issues with dosing and euthanasia method. It took less than 30 minutes to answer. I contacted IACUC to clarify the questions and found out we had NEVER made it to full committee!! Considering I worked day and night to get this done in the time frame suggested by IACUC, I was not very happy. I completely understand that it makes sense to have the reviewers' comments answered before going to full review, but they had the protocol for a full two weeks before the full committee meeting and it took a full month to get back the questions. I have no idea what was happening on their end as far as how/when they send protocols to reviewers.

April 21st - we received 'follow-up' comments from reviewers on brand-new issues they had not addressed the first time. Again, an issue that took 5 minutes to answer. I found this utterly frustrating, because I am not sure how they expect investigators to make progress when they keep coming up with new questions; this should all be done in ONE review. My boss suggested I call the IACUC chair and inquire about this issue; he was out of town at a conference.

April 24th - I was able to talk to the chair and he, in not so many words, agreed that this was a bit much and said when he saw this second round of questions, he had the vet intervene on our behalf and answer the reviewers' question for us, as it was very simple (maybe they should re-think having community members on the committee).

April 27th - WE ARE APPROVED, sort of. We received the approval email from IACUC and will be able to finally start on these experiments, almost a full month after we started this process, once we return the signature page.