At Striatech, we are dedicated to advancing vision research while upholding high standards of animal welfare. Our latest innovation—the Non-Aversive Animal Platform for the OptoDrum—reflects this commitment by facilitating reliable experiments, even with active, stress-prone, or otherwise challenging animal subjects.

Key Features of the New Animal Platform

• Non-Aversive Design
  The platform is engineered to minimize stress, enabling successful optomotor response experiments with a wide range of animals, including those that are typically more difficult to handle.
• Transparent Side Walls
  These calming features help reduce anxiety in animals, promoting natural behavior and more reliable data collection.
• Innovative “Tunnel-Lid”
  This design allows animals to voluntarily enter the platform in their home cage, ensuring a stress-free transition to the OptoDrum environment.

By integrating these features, the new Animal Platform not only enhances the quality of experimental data but also aligns with modern standards of ethical animal research. This development supports researchers in creating refined experimental conditions that further increase animal comfort and improve overall data validity – a prime example of Refinement of animal experiments.

Our new platform is another example of instrument design that puts animal welfare front and center, and it complements existing features of the OptoDrum.

Animal Welfare Features of the OptoDrum

• Behavioral readout to reduce animal numbers
  The OptoDrum provides a behavioral readout of the progression of visual decline or visual improvement over time. This readout is a reliable and proven proxy for the progression not only of visual diseases, but also conditions such a stroke, neuroinflammation, or Multiple Sclerosis. This reduces the need for other more invasive readouts (such as ERG – Refinement), or even terminal methods (such as histology – Reduction).
• Front door allows easy access to behavioral arena
  The OptoDrum has a front door, in contrast to other similar devices with a top lid. This eases animal handling and reduces animal stress. Most importantly, it provides easy access for cleaning, to avoid build-up of dirt and odor in the behavioral arena. Especially the odor of other animals could otherwise contribute significantly to animal stress – another example of Refinement.

Introduced at ARVO 2025

The new Non-Aversive Animal Platform was successfully introduced to the research community during ARVO 2025, where it received strong interest from scientists working with stress-prone or behaviorally complex animal models.