Laboratory Animal Training: Hands-on Workshops with Malaysian Universities Since 2014

The need

Researchers and postgraduate students who work with mice, rats and rabbits need practical skills: how to handle and restrain an animal, give an injection or an oral dose, take a blood sample and use anaesthesia. They also need to know the rules. The workshops in this programme covered the ethics and law of animal research, the requirements of each institution's animal care and use committee (IACUC), the 3Rs and humane end points.

Institutions were also working to raise the standard of their animal facilities. In 2016 the Institute for Medical Research (IMR), Ministry of Health Malaysia, held a workshop on raising animal care and use to internationally acceptable levels, including AAALAC International accreditation. A 2018 seminar at Universiti Sains Malaysia was aimed at IACUC members and research managers as well as researchers.

What Prima Nexus did

Many workshops were run by university animal units, including the Laboratory Animal Facility and Management (LAFAM) at UiTM Puncak Alam, the Comparative Medicine and Technology Unit (COMeT) and IACUC at Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM), and the Animal Experimental Unit at Universiti Malaya. They combined lectures with hands-on practicals, such as restraint, injection, oral gavage, blood sampling, anaesthesia and euthanasia.

Prima Nexus took part in three ways. It organised or co-organised events, for example with COMeT at UPM, with the Animal Research and Service Centre at USM and with CREAM at IIUM Kuantan. It sponsored workshops with participant materials and certificates, printed the reference guides for the IMR workshop, and sponsored places for postgraduate students and researchers. Its staff were also invited to speak: Dr Raymond Leong of Prima Nexus gave talks on specific pathogen free (SPF) animals, environmental enrichment, health monitoring and choosing animals for behaviour studies.

Prima Nexus sessions also covered the laboratory work that follows an animal study, such as preparing animal samples for molecular and toxicity tests. Prima Nexus organised its own hands-on training too. In 2017, researchers at the IPharm animal research facilities, part of the National Institutes of Biotechnology Malaysia, learned to measure blood pressure in laboratory animals non-invasively with the CODA system. In December 2025, Prima Nexus and Techman co-organised a demonstration of animal behaviour tracking software at UKM Kuala Lumpur.

Over the years

The event archive holds at least 27 laboratory animal training events between 2014 and 2025, in seven different years. Prima Nexus organised or co-organised 8 of them and was invited to speak or teach at 8 more. At the other 11 it was a sponsor or supporter.

Some workshops ran many times. Prima Nexus sponsored or co-organised the UPM workshop on the care and use of rodents in research five times between 2017 and 2019, and took part in at least six LAFAM workshops at UiTM between 2016 and 2019.

At least 22 universities and research institutes are named across the events, including 15 Malaysian universities and institutions from Singapore, India and Thailand. Attendance was recorded for only four events, which together had 118 participants.

What it means for research teams

Prima Nexus has worked for many years beside the units that train Malaysian researchers in animal work. A team planning a study in rats or mice can discuss the animals, the methods and the laboratory analysis that follows with Prima Nexus. Read more about Prima Nexus animal studies in rats and mice.

About Prima Nexus

Prima Nexus Sdn Bhd is a Malaysian research coordination group founded in 2014. It connects universities, research institutes and global technology partners, and runs eight scientific platforms under one roof: proteomics (including ELISA and Luminex multiplex immunoassays), genomics, flow cytometry, stem cell research, animal research, clinical trials, bioinformatics, and regulatory and grant support. Programmes it coordinates have supported more than 150 papers in peer-reviewed journals and research teams at more than 40 institutions across Malaysia. More about Prima Nexus.