With over 40 years of experience in laboratory animal testing equipment, O’Hara stands with researchers!

For over 40 years, O’Hara has been developing and manufacturing laboratory animal testing equipment in Japan and has now expanded to the US.

To fit the demands of their customers, O’Hara was created around the time experimental animals began being used for food and drug testing in Japan. During this time, the Central Institute for Experimental Animals (CIEA) was importing a large number of mice in the US and needed a cost-effective and labor-saving way to maintain breeding colonies of a growing number of experimental animals. This growing demand led to O’Hara’s first product: a watering system to automatically supply water to the constantly growing number of experimental animals at CIEA. This watering system proved to be extremely reliable and durable over time and is still widely used in many animal facilities across Japan.

In addition, O’Hara began working directly with pharmaceutical companies and academic labs to develop custom behavioral testing solutions, mainly for learning and memory experiments. These included simple and complex mazes, passive and active avoidance tests, fear conditioning chambers, and a host of other test batteries that O’Hara still manufactures today.

O‘Hara believes in changing to fit the demand of their customers. With the recent rise in technology aimed at monitoring and manipulating brain function in the living animal, neural activity monitoring in freely moving animals has become increasingly popular. However, this method makes it challenging to link brain activity to specific behaviors since the animal can move unrestrained. In order to alleviate this issue, O’Hara has developed several products that enable precise monitoring of neural activity during isolated operant behaviors, giving the experimenter control over the animals’ specific movement sequences.

O’Hara guarantees that the evolving needs of scientific researchers come first, which is how they have maintained a stable and returning customer base for over 40 years!