CAMARADES (The Collaborative Approach to Meta-Analysis and Review of Animal Data from Experimental Studies) was established in 2005 as collaboration between the Universities of Melbourne and Edinburgh to provide support and information to those conducting systematic reviews and meta-analyses of data from animal studies.
From an initial focus on translational difficulties in stroke research, their work has extended to consider animal models of multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, pain, psychosis, depression, spinal cord injury and glioma, and beyond neuroscience to myocardial infarction to environmental toxicology, breast cancer and vaccines research.
CAMARADES now involves more than 50 scientists in 13 countries and close links with the Cochrane and with SYRCLE. Aggregation of large datasets from diverse reviews have allowed analyses of risks of bias and publication bias which have made important contributions to improvements in reporting standards for preclinical research and current discussions of the reproducibility challenge in biomedical research.