FOCUS In Sound #34: Lisa Hara Levin Welcome to FOCUS In Sound, the podcast series from the FOCUS newsletter published by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. I’m your host, science writer Ernie Hood. In this edition of FOCUS In Sound, we meet a veterinarian who has become one of the leading voices in the movement to reduce, refine, or replace the use of animals in research and product development testing, also known as the 3Rs. As we will hear, she recently teamed up with Burroughs Wellcome Fund president Dr. Lou Muglia to publish a highly influential paper called Alternative Thinking about Animals in Research. Lisa Hara Levin is a graduate of Cornell University, received her veterinary degree from the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University, and completed her postdoctoral research training at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Her professional career has been spent in the animal protection and research environments, notably occupying positions as the Medical Director for New York City’s Animal Care Centers, and now as the Alternatives Director for Coridea, LLC, a premier biotechnology incubator based in New York. Lisa Hara Levin, welcome to FOCUS In Sound! LISA: Thanks, Ernie, I’m happy to be speaking with you. ERNIE: Lisa, to get us started, tell us how you got interested in the cause of promoting alternatives to animal use in testing… LISA: Oh that was a long time ago. I was a veterinary student working summers in a research lab at Johns Hopkins, and I was very fortunate to be mentored by a laboratory animal veterinarian having a great interest in animal welfare, so I started making my baby steps in the 3Rs, that’s the refinement, the reduction, the replacement of animals in research, and that’s a style that I carried with me through into my fellowship at Hopkins and later professional roles, where I was in the animal shelter setting, or I was doing research consultancy, and it’s served me very well. But your question did ask specifically about testing, and I want to make it clear that mentally, I place testing, research, and drug development all in the same what I call philosophical basket, so while maybe I started my career in research my field of vision has enlarged to include the other two areas. ERNIE: Tell us how you and Dr. Muglia connected, and how did the paper come about? LISA: I wanted to launch a project from a university, and I met him during that funding search. He thought the work I proposed was out of the box, and very happily for me, Burroughs Wellcome funded it. It did launch, set off from a different location, but the content remained the same. It was to have two roundtables with what I call the A-plus team from different groups having interest in the development, the regulatory approval, and the implementation of new approach methods. We also call them non-animal methods, or by the acronym NAMs in research, safety testing, and drug development. In terms of the paper, I’d been thinking a while about writing an article examining the NAMs and animal research question, and after the second roundtable was finished, I was scratching my head and said, you know, these conversations should have some place in the piece. So I spoke with Dr. Muglia, and he agreed to be my co-author. ERNIE: Tell us a little bit more about the two roundtables that you mentioned… LISA: I wanted to have the roundtables because to me there has been this needless argument between folks on one side who are endorsing animal use, and folks on another side, and it really is that polarizing at times—folks on the other side, who are in favor of NAMS. And in my view, I think this is entirely due to misunderstandings about each of their roles, in the past, the present, and what the predicted future may be for them in advancing science. So I invited members from the eight stakeholder groups that in my view are most closely associated with these areas, the development, again, the regulatory acceptance and the implementation of NAMs, and I wanted to seat them in one place and have some very relevant conversation. So they came, and who I mean by “they” are academics and industry who are working with NAMs, government regulators, government funders, venture capital, philanthropy, venture or otherwise, animal research advocacy, and animal protection. I won’t give you the names of those attending because that’s a confidentiality issue, but I can tell you and will tell you—there was a lot of magic that happened at these roundtables, and it was a beautiful thing to hear and to watch. I was really entirely my privilege to be part of those conversations. Everybody was so smart, so honest, so collegial. ERNIE: What were your objectives for the roundtables? LISA: If I look at several years back, and probably more than that, cause I’m an old lady, let’s say decades back, of observations about how stakeholders have problem-solved, they ...
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Nov 6 202317 mins
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