I follow the rules, most of the time. When they seem silly to me… I argue them… which usually fails.
A question for you all: Does your institution require one AUP per grant, or do you do blanket AUPs that cover the species and procedures in more than one grant?
**To define what I mean by “blanket”- a single AUP covering several procedures in detail, that covers the work in two grants (just for example).
Blue Lab Coats 
We can do a blanket AUP, but have to do our biosafety registration per grant….I don’t understand why it would be helpful to do this per grant other than to make more paperwork.
By AUP, I assume you mean “animal use protocol”. Every institution I’ve been in has preferred a blanket AUP to one per grant. But NIH does require the title of the AUP match the title of the grant. Every institution I’ve been in has a mechanism by which multiple titles can be associated with a single AUP.
What qaz said 🙂 for both private and state insitutions
Qaz- Would you, could you elaborate?
As qaz explained, a single animal protocol can be associated with multiple grants, and the IACUC has a staff member who is authorized to review a grant and a protocol to issue an official determination that the experiments proposed in the grant are within the scope of what was approved in the protocol.
C PP- What you are saying makes total and complete sense to me, as it would to anyone who has any sense. BUT- I’ve been told that it is a regulation of OLAW (Office of lab animal welfare), that the title of the AUP must match the title of the grant- and this has been interpreted to mean one AUP per grant. I CAN NOT imagine that this is the case, but need to know what the hard and fast rule is.
I’ve seen institutions that require the one AUP per grant and those that have one omnibus per lab. Ones that started as the former and then changed to something more like the single omnibus AUP.
So I doubt very much that this is an OLAW regulation. A preference, perhaps, but not a requirement.
Sounds to me like typical lazy bureaucrat-bs to avoid establishing the procedures to actually do the substantive checking that PP describes. Probably the matching titles magically makes the AUP consistent with the proposed studies in the app……
I think at my institute there is the capacity to put all grants on a single protocol, but you would have to go in for review each time you added one.
We use a single blanket AUP. Once the protocol’s approved, our animal studies office simply generates a whole series of approval letters that are identical except for the grant title (one letter per each grant associated with the protocol). One protocol per grant sounds unbelievably painful!
Mad Hatter- Yes. I’m fighting it and have been told that NO institution in their right mind would do a blanket AUP. From the comments here, that’s clearly not the case.
To elaborate – we have a mechanism at my university in which a single protocol (be it animal [IACUC] or human [IRB]) can have multiple titles. It works basically as MadHatter described – as long as one of the titles on the protocol matches, you’re ok. Adding a title to a protocol entails a letter to IACUC saying “please add this new title” and some boilerplate saying that the things being done on the grant still match the protocol. I have protocols with ten or fifteen titles – (not all of those titles were funded, but there’s no reason to take a title off the protocol once it’s attached).
But work within a protocol has to be self-consistent/on-a-single-topic. In practice, most labs have two to three protocols to cover their two to three areas of research. A truly omnibus protocol would be discouraged, but I also think it would be discouraged to have a separate protocol for each separate grant. (That’s a lot of extra work for the already over-burdened IACUC!)