Protocols for Animal Use and Care
You must have your Protocol for Animal Care and Use approved before you can conduct any project involving research, teaching, or testing using live, vertebrate animals. The protocol must be approved by the IACUC before you can begin the proposed activity. IACUC's normal turn around time is six to eight weeks.
Protocol Submission
The process of submitting a protocol for committee review is almost completely paperless:
- You can download one of our word processed forms from this website. After you've completed your protocol form, you'll e-mail it as an attachment to iacuc-staff@ucdavis.edu.
Reminder: Upon submission of your protocol, you may receive an e-mail that informs you of any individuals listed on the staff roster that need to fulfill the training requirements and/or need to complete the risk assessment and medical review forms for participation in the occupational health program. These requirements will need to be satisfied prior to the individual(s) being officially added to the protocol's staff roster.
Protocol Amendments
If you need to make minor changes to a currently approved protocol, you can sometimes file an amendment, rather than submit an entirely new protocol.
Protocols and Grants
Most, but not all, granting agencies allow to apply for a grant before the protocol has been approved. If your protocol has been submitted, but is not yet approved, indicate to the granting agency that the protocol is "pending". NIH and NSF normally allow sixty days for approval after the deadline date for the grant. If no approval from the IACUC follows within sixty days of the deadline date for the grant application, the agency will normally discard your grant application.
Some funding agencies (such as American Heart Association) require that the protocol be approved before the grant is submitted. Investigators are responsible for knowing the requirements of their particular agency.
It's Your Protocol
In all cases the final form you produce has to be neat and legible. If you have trouble using your computer, seek assistance from your departmental computer support person. If your printer is different than ours, if you have different defaults and styles set on your word processor, or if you have a different set of fonts than most people have, your document may look odd, even if the template that you downloaded is the correct one.
If your document has a bizarre appearance, get help. Don't submit documents that are twenty pages long, have funky line wraps, or are not legible. Ask for a printed copy to see what the document is supposed to look like.
The best person to help you is the computer support person in your own department. This is the person best able to analyze just what is going on.