Chapter 07: Departmental Roles and Strengthening Veterinary Care for Animal Colonies
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Description
In this chapter, Dr. Tinkey explains the administrative organization of various sections within the department and the roles she served to build the department during the nineties. She begins by explaining that Dr. Kim Vargas had organized the department in sections and assigned her to lead the Section of Laboratory Animal Medicine, which required an understanding of catheterization and a focus on herd health. She also notes that she was tracked to take over as Department Chair.
Dr. Tinkey explains how the Department needed to change in focus to serve the research needs at MD Anderson, developing more regulatory medicine and a focus on colony health surveillance and biosecurity. She says she needed to embark on a “crash course on rodent biology and diseases” and realized that the department didn’t offer the same kind of medicine for rodents/mice as it did for large animals. She notes in particular that the department did not offer a surgical training program for investigators working with mice. She explains that, in part, this had to do with the perceptions that PIs brought to their work with mice as experimental animals and the role they expected veterinarians to play in studies. Dr. Tinkey explains that veterinarians are much better integrated into research teams now than they were in the nineties.
At the end of the interview session she explains that pain management for rodents is one of the most ignored areas in research animal medicine. She explains assumptions that researchers make about animal pain and how pain can influence research results. She notes that at MD Anderson now, every animal that received survival surgery also gets pain medication.
Identifier
TinkeyPT_01_20160531_C07
Publication Date
5-31-2016
Publisher
The Making Cancer History® Voices Oral History Collection, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
Topics Covered
The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center - Building the Institution; Overview; Definitions, Explanations, Translations; The Clinician; The Administrator; Building/Transforming the Institution; Multi-disciplinary Approaches; Growth and/or Change; Obstacles, Challenges; Professional Path; Care; On Care; Offering Care, Compassion, Help; Patients; Patients, Treatment, Survivors; Discovery and Success; Professional Practice; The Professional at Work; Collaborations; Understanding Cancer, the History of Science, Cancer Research
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Disciplines
History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | Oncology | Oral History
Transcript
Peggy Tinkey, DVM:
Yeah, it was good enough. And so the rewind I wanted to do. So the other board-certified lab animal veterinarians. So Ken had the department organized into sections just like we do today. So there was a Section of Experimental Surgery and Large Animal Care. Doug Cromeens headed that section, that’s who I was working for. And then there was a section that was called Lab Animal Medicine. And back in that day by and large that was all rodents. And there was a board-certified lab animal veterinarian, Karen Vargas, who headed that section. So Karen really was the primary vet who was dealing with the IACUC, and maybe was on the Biosafety Committee. Karen was the regulatory medicine and rodent care veterinarian. And Ken required that veterinarian in that role to be lab animal board-certified.
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Can I ask you one sec? What’s IACUC?
Peggy Tinkey, DVM:
IACUC. The Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee.
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
All right, sorry about that.
Peggy Tinkey, DVM:
Yeah. Doug was one of those veterinarians, a great veterinarian, but not board-certified. So Doug was a general practitioner who had an interest and skill set in surgery. And he has his own history. But he basically came to Anderson because he was hired as a contractor by a couple of the researchers to help them do surgery on animals. And then Ken met him and then hired him for that role. So Ken didn’t consider that lab animal certification was necessarily needed in Doug’s particular role. But he considered it essential for somebody who was dealing with regulatory medicine and rodent medicine, because you didn’t learn much of that stuff out in practice. You learn that through the lab animal training specifically. I’m trying to remember when all this was. So Karen Vargas took a different job I think in about ’96 and left. And Ken called me in the office one day and said, “Karen is taking another job. I want you to take over that role.” So that is actually in ’96, when I moved from the large animal into the rodent area really. And what Ken said was “Without that board certification you can’t have this title. Board certification is required. I want you to get those boards.” In fact he knew when I was eligible. “When are you eligible again?” “The soonest I can possibly do this is ’98, Ken.” “But I want you to do the work. I want you to sit in the seat. I want you to do all the work. I want you to run the section. I’ll be the section chief in name.” Because he, Ken, was board-certified. “But you get that board certification and then we’ll make this official.” So that was the other thing that was interesting, because when I walked in to take the exam there were a whole lot of stakes on the line, because I couldn’t have the promotion. I couldn’t have the title. I was doing all the work, but I couldn’t officially fill that role until I passed that board exam.
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
So what was the role of section head? What was your responsibility at that point?
Peggy Tinkey, DVM:
So like I said, it changed a lot, because I was basically being a veterinary practitioner in the Large Animal Section. Here I was still being a veterinary practitioner, but with the rodents then and still yet today there’s less individual animal care. With the dogs there was individual animal care. Rodents is still much more a herd health situation. There are certain animals that are extremely valuable that we’ll put on antibiotics and we’ll do some individual medicine to, but by and large you’re not going to do an invasive surgery to try and fix a mouse. You’re probably going to humanely euthanize the mouse and take the tissue. So it’s more herd health. So I transferred into a much more regulatory medicine role. I needed to know now a lot more about just rodents in general. One of the big roles medicinewise is this colony health surveillance herd health mentality. So mice get diseases. And they get viral and bacterial diseases that are extremely disruptive to research. So people have learned years ago that you have to get clean mice and then keep them clean. So we have a really big biosecurity and disease surveillance program. A lot of the diseases that disrupt research don’t necessarily manifest in sick mice. You don’t even know the mice have the disease until all your research results don’t work because they’ve got an asymptomatic virus and it just screws up their immune responses. And if you’re doing immune research all of a sudden all your stuff doesn’t work but the mice don’t necessarily look sick. So we have to do a lot of disease surveillance to monitor that we don’t have something undetected in the colony. So it’s like an NCIS detective deal. You’ve got all these mice. They look OK. But you’re trying to make sure that you can identify a disease outbreak and isolate it before it wipes out your whole colony. So I had to really take a crash course in rodent biology, rodent diseases, and health monitoring and surveillance programs, and what do we monitor for, and what samples do we take, and all that kind of thing. So that and the individual animal health thing was a big part of the job. And then working with the IACUC and the Institutional Biosafety Committee was the other big part of the job.
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Now those were your tasks of record. Was there anything that you personally wanted to accomplish? This is a promotion, it’s a big deal. Did you have a vision for that role or what was going to come next?
Peggy Tinkey, DVM:
Well, maybe it wasn’t as well articulated as I have now. But one of the things I thought, especially coming from the large animal side, the herd health mentality for mice is legitimate, and I understood it, but I felt like we didn’t do nearly enough medicine for mice. We had no surgical training program. So on the large animal side Anderson’s culture was that all surgery was done either by or under the oversight of a veterinarian in our own surgery suites. So we didn’t have an investigator coming down and picking up their dog and going back to their lab and doing surgery and then bringing the dog back. No, no, no. All large animal stuff. But that’s not the way it was with rodents at all. In fact an investigator -- and it’s still this way. And some of them are very well trained. But some of them are not as well trained. We didn’t even know when the mouse was having surgery. Investigator would come, take a box of mice away, and then the box would come back, and the animal would have had surgery.
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Why is it important for you to know that or have that kind of hands on with the smaller animals?
Peggy Tinkey, DVM:
Well, that led to my conviction that the quality of care that we were giving to the rodents at the time I did not feel was sufficient. It was far less. Well, we assume it was far less. Many times I knew it was far less than what we were giving to the large animals. But that was the other thing. I could read what was happening in the protocol. I could read the investigator saying, “OK, here’s the anesthesia I’m going to use. And here’s the surgery I’m going to do.” But seeing how that was being done and how it was being administered and how the animal was being monitored for depth of anesthesia, most of that was done somewhere else. Didn’t necessarily have a veterinarian saying, “This is what I’m trained to do and I think I can help, I think I can provide input and advice and recommendations on either type of anesthesia or the method of surgery or the instrument you’re using or how you’re performing this particular procedure that’s going to be good for you and good for your research and good for the animal.”
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
So really this is asking for more of a team collaborative.
Peggy Tinkey, DVM:
Right. And Anderson wasn’t different. Back in the early ’90s I would say most places didn’t have a lot of veterinary integration into what was going on with the rodents. And like I said we’ll have to edit this so it doesn’t come out accusatory or defensive because it’s not meant to be. It was very much researcher-driven. And like I said, there are many researchers who are great surgeons and very skilled. But they’re not trained, that’s not what their background and training is as a surgeon. Their background and training is something else. And they had to learn to do surgery or invasive monitoring or whatever procedure they’re doing on the animal. They learn that secondarily to their research because they have to do this procedure. And veterinarians by and large, they’re trained to do stuff to animals. And now learning the research is secondary to that.
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Well, that’s always the challenge of the team. It isn’t just that the surgeon is learning the surgery. It’s that they’re only learning the surgery. They may not know all the other things that could be incredibly useful to help out and advance their research. And that’s obviously the piece that the trained veterinarian can bring.
Peggy Tinkey, DVM:
Right. And while we still have a ways to go, I would say that I am extremely proud that I think our situation today is incredibly different than it was in ’96 or ’97. There were a few years there where some of the folks I interacted -- if I popped up to somebody’s lab and said, “Hey, I’m here, I’d like to see this,” they would say, “What are you doing here? I can’t perceive any value you would bring to this process.” And in fact there was a lot of relationship building that had to go on because a lot of researchers never had a veterinarian come to their lab at all. And all of a sudden they’re like, “Why are you here? Who am I in trouble with? This can’t be a good thing that you’re appearing in my door.” And so we’ve had to work really hard to help people realize we’re a member of the team and there’s a lot of value that we can bring to the process. But now we have a really excellent surgical training program in rodent survival surgery that we offer free of charge that tons of people have taken. And we get great comments all the time. Oh, this has been so helpful. People actually call us now and say, “Hey, I’m having to do this surgery for the first time. Can you help me learn this?”
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Wow. This is what I call an interview cliff-hanger, because I’d like to hear about how you made that happen. Not only a lengthy process, but I’m sure it was a real challenge to build those bridges.
Peggy Tinkey, DVM:
It was. And like I said, the situation we have now, one of the most ignored areas I think back in ’96, ’97 for rodents was pain control. People just did not give pain reliever to their animals, no matter what kind of surgery they were doing to them. And that doesn’t make them bad people. You just have to know about mice. Mice and rats are prey animals. Bigger things eat them. Prey animals don’t look sick, even if they’re sick, because it makes you signal to the cat who’s coming down the hall, “Oh, I could be slower than the rest, and maybe you should try and eat me.” So prey animals do not show pain or distress or illness the way other animals do. They just don’t. In fact animals by and large -- I got to tell you back in the day when I was first in practice we did not give pain relievers to dogs that were having spays. And the dog would recover and be jumping around six hours later when the owner came to pick it up. And if I did abdominal surgery on you and didn’t give you any pain reliever, I don’t think you’d be jumping around. So animals are different. But that doesn’t mean they don’t feel pain. And I think as veterinarians we have had a huge evolution in recognizing that and recognizing signs of pain. But I think that’s why people perceived it wasn’t necessary, because you do surgery on a mouse. And two hours later mouse is eating food and like yeah, must be fine. So we’ve had a huge evolution. Just because the animal is moving around the cage and eating doesn’t mean it’s fine. And we need to really step it up. And we have come so far. Right now in this institution every single animal that has any type of survival surgery procedure gets pain relief, every single animal every single time. If they don’t, somebody messed up. And when we find those messups we have a training session and we do a lot of counseling. It’s really on people’s radar screen. But that was even an evolution that the IACUC itself had to get to.
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Wow. Well, let’s close off for today because we’re almost at noon. And I want to thank you for your time. This is really interesting.
Peggy Tinkey, DVM:
Is this getting you what you wanted?
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So I appreciate it.
Recommended Citation
Tinkey, Peggy T. DVM and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter 07: Departmental Roles and Strengthening Veterinary Care for Animal Colonies" (2016). Interview Chapters. 1227.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1227
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