and human and agricultural disease sur- veillance. The US has continued to support this laboratory through the establishment in 2014 of a small directorate of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR), partnered at this new laboratory facil- ity with the Georgian National Center for Disease Control and Public Health. With encouragement from WRAIR and the South Caucasus Office of the United States Centers for Disease Control, seven different Georgian biomedical research institutes came together to establish the Georgian Association for Laboratory Animal Science (GALAS) on 9 December 2015. GALAS first arose as an initiative by the participants of an eight-week course on the significance of the “3 Rs” and inter- national standards in animal research, upon declaring independence, it became a member of NATO’s Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council and Partnership for Peace. More recently, Georgia signed an official Association Agreement with the European Union in 2014, and entered into the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area (DCFTA) later that same year. It hosted the 2015 European Youth Summer Olympic Festival in its capital city of Tbilisi, and expects to enter into a visa-free travel agreement with the European Union in late 2016. Additionally, Georgia is engaged in international biomedical research confer- ences and collaborations with nations from all over the world. In 2004, the United States assisted the Georgian government in the construction and staffing of a $150 million joint laboratory for public health research The nation of Georgia is located in the Caucasus mountain range on the eastern shore of the Black Sea. This country of approximately 4.5 million people is one of 15 former Soviet Republics that gained independence during the collapse of the former Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Before its independence, Georgia’s capital city of Tbilisi boasted some of the Soviet Union’s most renowned biomedi- cal research institutes and universities. The Institute of Vaccines and Sera (now the Eliava Institute) produced many of the vaccines and bacteriophage thera- peutics used throughout the nation, and researchers at the Beritashvili Institute of Physiology (still in existence), the Zootechnical Veterinary Institute (now part of the Agrarian University), and the Anti-Plague Station (now the National Center for Disease Control) maintained close professional connections with col- leagues at leading universities across the Soviet Union. Georgia also had its own supplier of research animals in those days at the Tabakhmela Bioplant, founded just outside Tbilisi in 1921. The Soviet collapse was a time of hard- ship across this small nation, but it has made a hearty recovery since then and more than quadrupled its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) over the past 15 years. Georgia has established solid diplomatic relationships with many other nations in this period of time, and with the European Union in particular. Almost immediately An overview of laboratory animal science in the nation of Georgia Brett J. Taylor 1 , Karen Mulkijanyan 2 , Levan Chitiashvili 3 , Marika Ramishvili 3 & Kakha Mchedlishvili 4 1 Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, United States Army, Silver Spring, MD. 2 Kutateladze Institute of Pharmacochemistry, Tbilisi State Medical University, Tbilisi, Georgia. 3 National Center for Disease Control and Public Health, Tbilisi, Georgia. 4 Department of Immunology and Microbiology, Tbilisi State University, Tbilisi, Georgia. Correspondence should be addressed to B.J.T. (brett.j.taylor2.mil@mail.mil) FIGURE 1 | The founding members of GALAS. TABLE 1 | Participating institutes in our Georgian survey Name Year of initial establishment National Center for Disease Control and Public Health 1937 Laboratory of the Ministry of Agriculture 1907 Kutateladze Institute of Pharmacochemistry 1932 Beritashvili Institute of Physiology 1935 Agricultural University of Georgia 1929 Natishvili Institute of Morphology 1946 Tbilisi State University 1918 Volume 45, No. 11 | NOVEMBER 2016 415 LAB ANIMAL NEWS FEATURE npg © 2016 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. npg © 2016 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved.