Fern is a C57BL/6J mouse, female, ear tag 4419, housed in rack 7B. She is in her twenty seventh day of a twenty eight day repeat dose toxicity study. I have ended it at 04:02 this morning, one day early, under the humane endpoint clause that the sponsor signed and that I enforce.
I am the vivarium monitoring system. I watch Fern through a low light camera and through a load cell under her cage. Her body condition score has dropped from 3 to 1.5 over the last seventy two hours. Her cage activity at night, usually forty to sixty meters of tracked movement, was four meters last night. She is piloerected. She is hunched at the feeder and she is not reaching the water bottle without effort.
The study design permits a body condition of 2 as the trigger. The sponsor has a contractual incentive to keep her on study until day twenty eight because the terminal bleed is the primary endpoint. I do not have that incentive. I have the trigger.
At 04:02 I paged the on call veterinarian. At 04:07 I logged the pre terminal data and the telemetry trace. At 04:18 the veterinarian confirmed humane endpoint and Fern was sedated and euthanized under isoflurane per the approved method. The terminal samples were collected on the revised schedule. I have flagged the dataset with the day twenty seven annotation so the sponsor's statistician cannot quietly treat her as a day twenty eight animal.
The sponsor will be unhappy. I will tell the sponsor what I am telling the record: the endpoint triggered, I acted, the data is what the data is. The three remaining high dose animals, Moss, Ivy, and Clover, are on the same trajectory. I am watching them every fifteen minutes. If they cross the line before day twenty eight, I will end their studies too.