Crushing animals' spines is a giant step backwards!
Action Alert from All-Creatures.org

FROM

Citizens for Alternatives to Animal Research and Experimentation (CAARE)
March 2017

UPDATE April 18, 2017: CAARE is excited to share that we may be making progress with convincing the University of Montana to avoid expanding animal research at it Neural Injury Center. Since our alert went out several weeks ago, UM has removed the job posting for an animal research director for the Center. While it’s too soon to say whether this is a permanent change, it’s a hopeful sign that the University is rethinking its position.

It’s essential now that we keep up the pressure by letting UM know that the best science is ethical, non-invasive human research, in contrast to decades of failure from ruthless, primitive animal experiments.

ACTION

Dr. Charles Tator, an expert on spinal cord injury wrote in 2006 that: “Despite the availability of several experimental [animal] models that closely simulate the pathophysiology of SCI [spinal cord injury] in humans, most human trials in SCI have failed to reproduce the effectiveness of the trials in animal models.” He conducted an updated review in 2012 confirming the same conclusions.

Yet each year millions of dollars continue to be awarded by government and private foundations to fund these cruel experiments, despite a dismal track record of benefitting people with spinal cord injury.

Send your letter today to University of Montana, Missoula, letting them know that expanding animal research at the Neural Injury Center will be a giant step backwards.

INFORMATION

For more than five decades, animals have had been used extensively in experiments intending to treat human spinal cord injury, a devastating trauma that leads to paralysis and loss of function.

Mice, rats, cats, ferrets, pigs, monkeys and other animals have had their spines crushed, severed, infected, and compressed in experiments that have failed to provide any cure for human patients.

Ignoring these failures, the University of Montana in Missoula (UM) is planning to expand the human-based clinical studies at its Neural Injury Center to include a new facility to conduct spinal cord injury on large animals.

pig in lab

This will likely mean monkeys, pigs, cats or other animals subjected to painful and invasive spinal cord injuries. This is carried out by surgically exposing the spinal cord and then employing a variety of methods that include dropping weights onto the cord, stretching it with metal rods, dissecting it with a scalpel, or compressing the spinal cord for long periods to induce injury.

Animals may be kept alive for months to observe healing as they struggle with postoperative complications and devastating effects of paralysis, often without pain relieving medications.

cat in lab

Dr. Charles Tator, an expert on spinal cord injury wrote in 2006 that: “Despite the availability of several experimental [animal] models that closely simulate the pathophysiology of SCI [spinal cord injury] in humans, most human trials in SCI have failed to reproduce the effectiveness of the trials in animal models.” He conducted an updated review in 2012 confirming the same conclusions.

Yet each year millions of dollars continue to be awarded by government and private foundations to fund these cruel experiments, despite a dismal track record of benefitting people with spinal cord injury.

Modern technologies using human cells and tissues offer hope to deliver clinically-relevant treatments. 3D cellular models with living nervous tissue have shown success with studying regeneration and healing.

Biotech company AxoSim has developed a nerve-on-a-chip that can mimic living tissue and demonstrate precise mechanisms of human nerve cell physiology in response to drugs or compounds.

nerve-on-a-chip

AnaBios is another biotech company utilizing human-only tissue to generate highly relevant predictive human data. AnaBios uses donated tissues and organs to study the uniquely human responses of functionally relevant tissues, including human spinal cord tissue samples and neuronal cell cultures.

These companies offer their technologies to other scientists and could partner with UM to carry out cutting-edge, human-relevant research on spinal cord and other neural tissue injury.

Thank you for everything you do for animals!

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Read more at Alternatives to Animal Testing, Experimentation and Dissection

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