Welcome to the Safe Haven Lab Cages (SHLC) blog! In the world of scientific research, the quality of lab animal caging plays a critical role in ensuring reliable results and maintaining high standards of animal welfare. However, researchers often face challenges in finding reliable and affordable caging solutions. Scientists’ ability to buy lab animal cages has long been limited to a select few providers of lab animal enclosures who have monopolized the industry, offering few, if any, advancements in efficiency or cost.
Today, we introduce Safe Haven Lab Cages, a company dedicated to addressing these challenges with innovative, high-quality, and economical lab animal housing solutions.
About Safe Haven Lab Cages (SHLC)
Safe Haven Lab Cages (SHLC) is a minority-owned, US-operated business specializing in the design and manufacturing of high-quality lab animal caging. Our mission is to provide researchers with precision-engineered, cost-effective lab animal housing solutions that enhance lab animal welfare and support rigorous scientific research. Founded by experts in lab animal research and high-quality animal caging manufacturing, we are already developing a catalog of innovative research-grade lab cage solutions for small mammal research labs.
Products and Services: Revolutionizing Research Animal Caging Solutions
Safe Haven Lab Cages specializes in designing laboratory housing solutions for small to medium mammals – such as treeshrews, marmosets, 13-lined ground squirrels, and birds. By combining expert insights and advanced engineering, we deliver products that meet the highest standards of durability and functionality. Our products are made from high-quality, autoclavable, and washable stainless steel, ensuring durability and ease of maintenance.
Key Features of SHLC Cages:
- Species-Specific Designs: Tailored to meet the unique needs of different species – including innovative treeshrew and marmoset cages – enhancing animal welfare and research accuracy.
- Customization Options: We offer custom cage designs to suit specific research requirements, ensuring optimal functionality.
- Observation and Enrichment Capabilities: Integrated features that promote animal well-being and ease of monitoring.
- Collapsible Cages For Space-Saving Storage: Foldable, compact footprint design allows for easy transport and deployment to meet your colony housing needs.
The compact storage footprint of the Treeshrew Collapsible Mansion Cage enables researchers to strategically deploy housing to meet dynamic colony housing requirements.
Commitment to Innovation and Quality
In addition to our standard housing solutions, we can also develop custom animal cages designed to suit your research study. Contact us to inquire about a custom animal cage design and learn how our expert animal caging solutions can further your research.
Our Mission and Core Values
At SHLC, our mission is clear: to offer high-quality, economical lab animal caging with fast turnaround times, specifically designed to meet researchers’ needs.
Core Values: Integrity, Affordability, Excellence
We believe in integrity, affordability, and excellence in all we do. We understand that the cost of animal maintenance is high, while funding is often limited. That's why we are committed to making our cages affordable without compromising on quality. Our products are meticulously crafted to ensure ease of use for animal care technicians and optimal care for the animals, leading to more reliable research outcomes.
Designed for Research Integrity & Compliance with AAALAC & NIH
Our caging systems are designed in compliance with The Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals, which sets the standards for lab animal care. Published by the National Research Council and the Institute for Laboratory Animal Research, The Guide is the foundation for AAALAC International accreditation and a crucial component of Public Health Service Policy on humane care and use of laboratory animals.
Importance of The Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals
The Guide's recommendations are enforceable under the Health Research Extension Act passed by Congress in 1985. Noncompliance can lead to the loss of AAALAC International accreditation, which is essential for maintaining funding from institutions like the NIH. By adhering to the guidelines in The Guide, we ensure our products provide the necessary space, social environment, and care that laboratory animals require. This includes considerations for housing animals singly or in groups based on their natural behaviors and social needs, as well as maintaining stable group compositions to prevent behavioral and physiological issues.
At SHLC, we are committed to exceeding these standards, not just meeting them, to promote the highest levels of animal welfare and research integrity.
Expert-Informed Lab Animal Cage Design Innovations
Our comprehensive lab animal housing solutions are developed with input from experienced small mammal scientists, which ensures that our products provide ease of monitoring, feeding, and handling. Our housing solutions adhere to the rigorous standards required for reliable research results, ensuring that both researchers and animals benefit from our designs.
Founder Expertise: Dr. Joe Wekselblatt
Dr. Joe Wekselblatt, one of SHLC’s co-founders, has a wealth of experience with unique species that has driven him to design new lab animal caging systems with SHLC. As a seasoned researcher, Joe’s academic journey began with his graduate studies focused on the interaction of visual processing, task engagement, and motor output in large-scale cortical dynamics. With over 15 years of experience in neuroscientific techniques, Joe has gained extensive expertise in observing and, in some cases, controlling cortical circuit function in behaving animals.
Dr.Joseph Wekselblatt on a walk with his dog.
Innovative Work with Tree Shrews
During his time at the California Institute of Technology (CalTech), working with the Tsao and Shapiro labs, Joe aimed to perfect chronic recording techniques and acoustically targeted chemogenetics (ATAC) for use in tree shrews. This innovative work enabled the acquisition of data from identified populations along the visual hierarchy, dissecting the contributions of excitatory and inhibitory cell types and analyzing bottom-up and top-down signals under various behavioral and viewing conditions. His manuscript on this project, “A Compressed Hierarchy for Visual Form Processing in the Tree Shrew,” is currently under review at Nature.
Tree shrews habitating the SHLC Treeshrew Framed 2-Cage Multilevel Unit designed by Dr. Joe Wekselblatt.
Current Research with Marmosets
Joe's postdoctoral training led him to join the faculty of the UCLA Department of Ophthalmology in the David Geffen School of Medicine. Here, he collaborates with Alex Huk to study cortical circuits in the visual system that govern perception and behavior in the marmoset monkey. This work aims to uncover how these circuits are adaptively modified by learning and identify abnormalities in models of developmental disorders such as autism and visual impairments like retinitis pigmentosa and macular degeneration. Joe believes that the marmoset will be a powerful model organism for tackling these research questions and providing the systems neuroscience community with new insights into human brain function and dysfunction.
Impacts SHLC’s Innovative Lab Caging System Designs
Dr. Wekselblatt’s extensive direct experience with treeshrews and marmosets has been instrumental in spearheading the development of SHLC’s innovative caging systems to provide the next-generation of high-quality, affordable lab animal cages. This dedication to improving animal welfare and research efficiency is at the heart of SHLC’s ethos. By leveraging his deep understanding of the unique challenges in housing small to medium mammals, Joe ensures that SHLC's products are designed to meet the specific needs of researchers and their subjects.
A tree shrew looks up while climbing in the SHLC Treeshrew Collapsible Standard Cage used for housing the species at CalTech.
Conclusion
At Safe Haven Lab Cages, we are dedicated to providing researchers with reliable, affordable, and innovative lab animal housing solutions. Our mission, driven by a commitment to excellence and animal welfare, ensures that our products support high-quality research outcomes. We invite you to explore our website to learn more about our products, customization options, and how to purchase the perfect caging solution for your research needs.
We are always seeking ways to improve the state of research animal cages and would like to hear from you: What challenges have you faced in finding the right lab animal caging? Are you facing species-specific challenges with your existing lab animal cages? Let us know your thoughts by leaving a comment on our LinkedIn and follow our page to stay informed about how we are changing the research caging industry.
Contact us today to see how our animal caging solutions can further your research.