Kim Wever is a Dutch biologist, post-doctoral research fellow at SYRCLE and an active member of CAMARADES since 2013. Prior to focussing on preclinical SRs, she was an in vivo researcher using models in humans and animals to develop new treatment strategies against ischemia-reperfusion injury. It was during this time that she became aware of the many challenges, both practical and ethical, faced by preclinical researchers. This motivated her to shift her research focus to understanding and resolving the poor clinical translation of animal studies. She now conducts preclinical SRs and MAs, develops methodology to do so, and provides training and coaching to others.

My main research interest is systematic review and meta-analysis of animal models of depression. I am using text-mining and machine learning techniques to help automate the process of systematic reviews, to deal with the increasing amount of literature being published. I’m a joint PhD Candidate at CAMARADES, University of Edinburgh & TNU, Aarhus University. My background is in Psychology and I completed an MSc by Research in Integrative Neuroscience at University of Edinburgh.  

Merel Ritskes-Hoitinga (DVM, PhD, Dipl. ECLAM) is Professor in Evidence-Based Laboratory Animal Science at the Department for Health Evidence at the Radboud University Medical Center, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. She has founded SYRCLE (www.syrcle.nl) in 2012, focussing on education, coaching and research in the field of systematic reviews of animal studies. Systematic reviews lead to the actual implementation of the 3Rs, a more evidence-based choice of animal models and transparency in quality and translation of animal studies. SYRCLE participates in international networks: CAMARADES, Evidence-Based Toxicology, Evidence-Based Research Network, GRADE and Evidence Synthesis International, and is preparing an application for a Cochrane methods group. From 1997-2005 she was professor in Laboratory Animal Science and Comparative Medicine at the Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Southern Denmark. In 2017 she is visiting professor at the Department for Clinical Medicine at Aarhus University. Full cv www.ritskes-hoitinga.eu

Emily S Sena, PhD Research Fellow, Centre for Clinical Brain Sciences, University of Edinburgh Convener, CAMARADES.

Emily has a background in neuroscience and is a research fellow specialised in the validity of preclinical studies. Her research interests are in the use of systematic review and meta-analysis of preclinical efficacy studies to increase the understanding of critical facets of translational medicine and developing new hypotheses for testing in the laboratory. Since 2015 she has led the Collaborative Approach to Meta-Analysis and Review of Animal Data from Experimental Studies (CAMARADES), a multicentre international research collaboration facilitating the pooling and analysis of data from a range of disease models across the basic sciences. To support this she has developed an internationally accessible database, similar to the Cochrane library, to facilitate interpretation of the preclinical data used to justify progression to clinical trial. Her research has informed laboratory practice guidelines, editorial policy and the design of clinical trial protocols.

Sarah McCann is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow with CAMARADES at the Centre for Clinical Brain Sciences, University of Edinburgh. During her doctoral training at the University of Melbourne, Australia, she investigated the regulation of oxidative stress in animal models of stroke. Subsequently, her research has centred on analysis of preclinical studies to help understand and resolve the translational failure between animal experiments and clinical trials. Her current research interests are developing analysis methods to more reliably inform selection of drugs for advancement, identifying aspects of experimental design that contribute to biased outcomes, and reducing research waste.