EXPERIMENTS on animals have always been controversial, but probably never more so than now.
Animal-based research and testing cause suffering and death for an estimated 115 million animals each year. Three million of those die in British labs.
Some people are surprised that less than half of animal experiments are for medical research. Even more surprising is that most animal research has never been assessed to modern standards for its value in developing new treatments.
Recently, scientists reviewed the development of six treatments for human illnesses. They looked at whether 221 tests on 7100 animals had predicted the outcome of these therapies in patients. They found the animal and human results agreed only 50 per cent of the time. The US drug regulatory agency has admitted that 92 per cent of all medicines passing animal tests ultimately fail in humans. As a result, the agency is now pursuing a "21st century approach" to medicines development: moving away from unreliable animal tests.
Non-animal research can solve many problems currently besetting medical progress. Test-tube techniques using human cells are more relevant to humans and are quicker and cheaper than experiments on animals. The Dr Hadwen Trust for Humane Research is funding research that aims to improve medical progress with sepsis. Sepsis is a very common cause of death in intensive care units, and animal research has failed to deliver effective treatments. Our research uses human kidney cells in the test-tube to find answers that otherwise would have involved considerable suffering for laboratory animals.
Modern non-animal techniques can replace outdated and unreliable animal experiments and improve the quality of research.
These techniques include gene-hunting tools to find the genes that predispose some people to illnesses; molecular methods for safety testing chemicals; clinical studies in volunteers; biosensors that meld cell-level research with microelectronics; and computer simulations that allow virtual experiments. These methods are providing fast, reliable answers that laborious and painful animal experiments cannot.
In the last 30 years non-animal research has replaced millions of laboratory animals, but progress in developing these methods could be much faster. Increased and targeted funding from government and medical charities would make a big difference. Drug, chemical and cosmetics companies should work together to maximise progress. And university researchers should be very concerned about their increasing reliance on animal experiments that cause pain and distress but are fundamentally flawed.
A new direction is urgently needed and now is the time.
Dr Gill Langley PhD is science director of the Dr Hadwen Trust for Humane Research
The full article contains 444 words and appears in Edinburgh Evening News newspaper.
