University of California, San Francisco – Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases

I’d like to take this opportunity to share with you our experiences with the M.I.C.E. caging system technology.

Two years ago we were asked to house and breed SCID mice for an experimental project. We were reluctant to even begin this project as our facility is a “conventional” facility. We have several mouse pathogens present throughout the facility. This fact is established from the results of a bi-annual sentinel program.

On the insistence of the investigator, we decided to house and breed the SCID mice in the M.I.C.E. caging system, and to provide them with sulfa drugs in the water. We kept the mice healthy for the period of this project, which was approximately 6 months.

We were able to breed them and produce several litters of SCID pups; they survived and were very healthy. I was very impressed by the M.I.C.E. caging system that provided strong bio-security to this population in an environment known to harbor several mouse pathogens that would have killed these immuno-suppressed mice.