AAALAC International

AAALAC International (Association for Assessment and Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care International) is a private, nonprofit accrediting body, headquartered in Frederick, Maryland, that evaluates and accredits animal research, teaching, and testing programs at institutions worldwide against standards that go beyond the minimum required by law. Unlike the PHS Policy on Humane Care and Use of Laboratory Animals or the Animal Welfare Act (AWA), AAALAC accreditation is entirely voluntary: no US law or federal funding regulation requires an institution to hold it. Institutions pursue it as a mark of program quality, and many funders, journals, and international partners treat it as a meaningful signal even though it confers no independent legal standing.

Origins and current scope

The organization was founded in 1965 as the American Association for Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care by veterinarians and researchers seeking a peer-review alternative to direct government regulation. It was renamed the Association for Assessment and Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care International in 1996 to reflect its expanding international reach, and has operated under the acronym AAALAC International alone since 2016. Today it accredits programs across roughly 1,000 organizations worldwide, spanning universities, pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, government laboratories, and other research institutions across dozens of countries.

How accreditation works

AAALAC accreditation is a triennial, peer-review process, not a one-time certificate. An accredited institution submits a detailed Program Description covering its animal care and use program, veterinary care, physical facilities, and IACUC (or equivalent) oversight structure, then hosts an on-site visit conducted by AAALAC’s trained ad hoc consultants — typically working veterinarians and scientists volunteering their expertise — roughly every three years to confirm continued compliance. AAALAC’s Council on Accreditation reviews the site-visit findings and the Program Description and decides whether to grant, continue, or withhold accreditation, and can require corrective action on specific deficiencies before renewing.

The Three Primary Standards

Rather than writing its own detailed husbandry rules from scratch, AAALAC evaluates programs against three existing, externally authored reference standards, selected based on the species and location involved:

• The Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals (the “Guide”), prepared by the National Research Council’s Institute for Laboratory Animal Research and published by the National Academies Press — the primary standard for most laboratory-animal species in the US and many other countries, and the same document PHS Policy requires PHS-funded institutions to base their Assurance on.
• The Guide for the Care and Use of Agricultural Animals in Research and Teaching (the “Ag Guide”) for agricultural species used in a research or teaching context.
• The European Convention for the Protection of Vertebrate Animals Used for Experimental and Other Scientific Purposes (ETS 123) and related European/international instruments, applied for programs located outside North America.

AAALAC also expects accredited institutions to be in full compliance with all applicable local, national, and international laws and regulations — accreditation supplements the mandatory legal floor rather than substituting for it.

How AAALAC differs from PHS Policy and the Animal Welfare Act

Research institutions in the US animal-research compliance landscape typically encounter three distinct frameworks, and confusing them is a common source of error in institutional policy documents:

• Animal Welfare Act (AWA) — a mandatory federal statute (7 U.S.C. §2131 et seq.) enforced by USDA APHIS through inspection and licensing; applies only to AWA-covered species (excludes purpose-bred rats, mice, and birds).
• PHS Policy on Humane Care and Use of Laboratory Animals — a mandatory condition of NIH/PHS funding, administered by NIH’s Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare (OLAW); applies to any live vertebrate animal in PHS-supported work, including species the AWA excludes.
• AAALAC International accreditation — entirely voluntary, privately administered, not tied to any specific funding source or species list; an institution can be fully compliant with the AWA and PHS Policy without ever seeking AAALAC accreditation, and can hold AAALAC accreditation regardless of whether it receives PHS funding or works with AWA-covered species at all.

In practice the three are complementary rather than redundant: many AAALAC-accredited institutions describe accreditation as validating that their AWA/PHS Policy compliance program actually functions as documented, delivered through an independent peer-review lens rather than a regulatory inspection. Because AAALAC’s standards (particularly the Guide) frequently exceed the AWA’s minimum facility requirements and the PHS Assurance’s baseline expectations, accreditation is often used by institutions, funders, and international collaborators as shorthand evidence of a program’s quality above the regulatory floor — but it is never itself the source of a legal obligation.

References

• AAALAC International, “About AAALAC” and “The Three Primary Standards” (aaalac.org)
• AAALAC International, “Rules of Accreditation” (aaalac.org)
• Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals, National Research Council, 8th edition
• PHS Policy on Humane Care and Use of Laboratory Animals (NIH OLAW)
• Animal Welfare Act, 7 U.S.C. §§2131–2159 (as amended)