New Use Categories Announced

July 28, 2016

In an effort to help relieve administrative burden on Principal Investigators and their labs, the Institutional Animal Care & Use Committee (IACUC) recently transitioned to a Use Category (UC) scale. In addition to simplifying protocol processes, this transition more closely aligns University of Michigan practices with those of other peer institutions and addresses feedback given by the AAALAC Council on Accreditation.

  • Animal Protocols for ALL species will now use a letter scale of Use Categories C, D, and E to define requested authorized numbers. This is consistent with the USDA's Animal Use Categories. The previous 1-9 scale will map to the new letter scale as follows:
    • Use Categories 1-2 = C
    • Use Categories 3-6 = D
    • Use Categories 7-9 = E
       
  • Animal Usage for USDA species will be reported and calculated based on the appropriate USDA Use Category C/2, D/3, or E/7 definitions.
     
  • Animal Usage for non-USDA species will be classified as a single category moving forward.

The Animal Care & Use (ACU) Office has begun to manually transition approved protocols, and will continue to do so, over the next several months. Changes are being addressed as follows:

  • New protocols (applications currently in the approval process, newly created applications, new renewal applications, or newly copied protocols on or after July 11, 2016) will exclusively use the new C-E UC scale.
     
  • Currently approved protocols (as of July 11, 2016) will initially use the 1-9 UC scale and will be manually transitioned to the new C-E UC scale by the ACU Office over the next several months.
     
  • Expired or cancelled protocols (prior to July 11, 2016) will remain with the 1-9 UC scale.

Study Teams should be minimally impacted during this transition, with the key changes being mainly visual in nature. Due to the nature of the changes, forms untouched in eRAM were cancelled to allow transition of the Use Categories. This includes:

  • Amendments untouched for more than 60 days
  • Animal Use Forms untouched for more than 30 days

A complete overview of the visual changes can be reviewed on the eRAM Changes to Use Categories page.

Throughout the transition, please be advised that the ACU Office may need to contact you with specific questions about your protocol(s). Once the transition is complete, teams should notice a relief of some administrative burden pertaining to protocol processing, maintenance, and reporting.

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact the ACU Office at acuoffice@umich.edu or (734) 763-8028.