Astellas Prepares New Vivarium Program For Success With Cayuse

Challenge

Astellas Pharma Inc. is a Japanese pharmaceutical company with offices around the globe. In 2021, the company expanded its Westborough, Massachusetts branch with a new vivarium program to broaden its research capacity. With the program starting from scratch, organizers understood the necessity of securing a digital research management system from the start.

Astellas Vivarium Manager Yehia Wafa recalls working in vivarium management before electronic research management systems were commonplace. Communication and organizing were far more tedious, with manual reminders, data tracking, and protocol reviews creating significant administrative burden, and decentralized information storage introducing unwelcome opportunities for miscommunications, redundancies, and errors.

Yehia championed the use of an electronic management system to avoid these pitfalls and save resources. “If everyone relies on his or her memory, or if we need someone to monitor when everyone has to update or review their protocol or send an email, it could lead to a lot of issues.”

What’s more, Yehia highlighted the importance of finding and implementing a management system before starting the program.

“If you don’t have something from the beginning, it becomes an issue once you have a decent number of users in the vivarium,” he noted, “because if you decide to buy the system later when you have more protocols and people in the vivarium, you have to import all this work back into the system.”

Solution

While researching potential management solutions, organizers sought a system that would work well for their team out of the box while providing enough configurability to meet more specific requirements. The ideal solution would be neither too rigid, nor too open-ended.

For example, Yehia remembers that one of the initially considered solutions was “very configurable, like 100%.” However, this unlimited configurability presented its own issues. “You had to do configuration in the process as you were working, and I wasn’t really happy with that because it’s like you are giving me a piece of clay and telling me, okay, make it the shape that you want.”

“I want, at least the basic structure,” he countered, “because, in most of the animal care facilities, there are basic processes. We all order animals, we are all going to submit protocols. We are all going to do health care, we are all going to do a census.”

Due to his familiarity with Cayuse from a previous vivarium management role, Yehia suggested considering Cayuse among potential options. With the out-of-the-box features expected of a management solution and the integrations and configurability needed for Astellas Pharma specifically, Cayuse Vivarium Operations seemed like an excellent fit.

“It’s not the kind of system that you have to spend an immense amount of work implementing or holding people’s hands and training them, which is something we didn’t have the bandwidth for,” he noted, “and I understand the system is really compatible with different systems.”

After completing initial exploratory discussions and benchmarking, the program’s organizers agreed to implement Cayuse Vivarium Operations. When comparing Cayuse to the competition, “Cayuse was a winner in general,” Yehia recalled, “Everyone said, ‘that’s a very straightforward system. I like it. I think we should get it.’”

Results

Since implementing Cayuse Vivarium Operations and launching the vivarium program, Yehia and other Astellas Pharma staff indicated that the software has been very successful at supporting all areas of vivarium management.

Faculty were exceptionally pleased with Cayuse’s ease of use and helpful automation, which has saved time along every step of the project lifecycle. “We don’t have to spend a lot of time on the communication,” Yehia indicated, “once we complete one function, two or three functions branch out from it automatically. The IACUC coordinator does the same review process and submission process. It’s very easy, they don’t have to spend a lot of time drafting emails.”

Organizers were so pleased with Vivarium Operations, Animal Oversight, and animal procurement modules that they later added the Hazard Safety. The ability to integrate a SoftMouse breeding colony module and study manager module together made a perfect package for the program’s needs.

Yehia noted that the time and resource savings introduced with Cayuse have been substantial. “If you want to look at statistics or metrics and how much you have saved from that, I’m sure it’s going to be lots of hours and certainly dollars for what you would have invested if you continued to use conventional paper-based methods.”

As for others considering a similar research management solution, “Get something that’s really going to cut the time that you’re spending on the work,” Yehia concluded, “not add to lost time or cause you mental stress figuring out how to use this system.”