• Question: What are your views on the use of animals for drug testing?

    Asked by Radhika to Alex, Laura, Lesley, Richard, vediacan on 18 Jun 2015. This question was also asked by Hazman.
    • Photo: Richard Prince

      Richard Prince answered on 18 Jun 2015:

      Another great question! Are you also studying philosophy and ethics?
      At the moment animals are used in drug testing in three ways.
      First of all, animal models of a disease are created in order to see if a potential drug actually works. For example, rats called Fatty Zuckers are naturally prone to obesity and get type 2 diabetes. They can be used to test drugs designed to treat this disorder. However, for some diseases, it can be difficult to get an animal model that works. For example, how do you judge if a rat is depressed? If it does get depressed, it won’t exhibit the same symptoms as a human. For most diseases, testing in animals happens quite late on in the drug discovery process. Most compounds that are made are tested in cell-based systems and if they don’t show any activity, will never be given to an animal. At the moment, drug companies are still used higher animal models like rats and mice, but they are also developing more tests in things like flies and fish. I think the number of animals used this way in drug testing will continue to decline over the coming years.
      The second way that animals are used is to try and predict how a human might absorb and metabolise a drug. It used to be that we could not make predictions from cell based systems about drug absorption and metabolism, but that has changed a lot over recent years and we do not need to do quite so much of this kind of testing any more.
      The final way is in safety testing. It is obviously critical that a drug is safe before it is given to humans and there are legal requirements to test drugs for safety in at least two species. Not only is immediate toxicity looked at, but also the potential for it to cause cancer or birth defects. This is one of the final stages of testing and one of the most expensive parts of the non-human work. Pharmaceutical companies therefore try to predict toxicity at an early stage so they don’t spend time looking at compounds that turn out to be dangerous. Even with animal testing, not all drugs are safe when they are first given to humans. Have you heard of TGN1412? Here is a BBC story from shortly after this disaster occurred:
      http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/5121824.stm
      I think this is the sort of thing Alex has nightmares about!

      Personally I don’t use live animals in my work, though I have used animal tissues quite a lot. My opinion is that if there is an equal or better alternative, then we should use it. If not, we should use the animals but work hard to develop that alternative.
      Have a look at the NC3Rs – it’s a national organisation dedicated to reducing, replacing and refining animal experiments.
      https://www.nc3rs.org.uk/
      Best wishes
      Richard

    • Photo: Vedia Can

      Vedia Can answered on 22 Jun 2015:

      Hi Radhika,

      Fantastic yet a tricky question! I agree with Richard’s diplomatic answer; there are 3 ways animals can be used in drug testing. My research does not use animal work because I would need to use Elephants to test the effect of the drugs; certain animals cannot be used to replicate a disease model; rats do not have large joints or cartilage and does not even resemble human cartilage. So, I would need to use a large animal, which I refuse to (even if I had the choice) and it is ethically wrong. My views on animal testing are simple, only use animals as a last resort (approved by the ethics council), if it is imperative and suited to your disease model. I have always looked at alternative ways of carrying out my research (strong advocate of the NC3Rs group), whether it be by obtaining patient samples or using cell-lines because these sources are more suited towards my views.

      Best Wishes,

      Vedia

    • Photo: Laura Newton

      Laura Newton answered on 22 Jun 2015:

      Hey Radhika!

      My view is that unfortunately we don’t have a better alternative at the moment. We have to test drugs on something before we give them to humans. There may have been some stories about people getting very sick when taking new drugs and some people have used these incidents to argue that animal testing doesn’t work. But if you consider how many drugs that we have available now that are safe for us to use that help hundreds of thousands of people every day it shows a different side of the story.
      If pharmaceutical companies couldn’t test on animals and instead had to give them straight to humans then there would be so much more risk in clinical trials that no one would ever want to participate in them. They would get sued so many times they would lose so much money. The flow of drug development would dwindle down and it would be so hard for us to find new cures for disease. Whether you believe that it’s worth sacrificing animals for us to find new cures is something that you have to decide for yourself.

      I don’t use animals in my research and neither does anyone else that doesn’t really need to. As the other’s have said the NC3R program is trying to find better ways. Also, animal welfare standards for research are really high, the animals are actually looked after very well and monitored all the time.

      Thanks for your question!
      Laura

    • Photo: Lesley Pearson

      Lesley Pearson answered on 23 Jun 2015:

      I think that until we find a better way of testing if a medicine works and if it is safe before we give it to people, then we do need to continue to use animals in research.

      Animal testing should always satisfy three principals: it needs to be necessary, sufficient and ethical. We need to be certain that there is no other way to obtain the data we are looking for, we need to make sure that we have enough animals in the experiment so that our data is robust, and we need to make sure that we are doing everything possible to make the animals are comfortable and well looked after.

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