This hospital is torturing mice to test Botox
Action Alert from All-Creatures.org

FROM CAARE Citizens for Alternatives to Animal Research and Experimentation
June 2020

ACTION

Boston Children’s Hospital must end torturous and unnecessary boptulinim tests.

Systemic paralysis causes a slow death as it gradually affects the respiratory muscles, causing mice to gasp hopelessly for air. Some will die by asphyxiation, but other mice will die because they cannot reach food or water. Their death is the result of dehydration and weight loss, and not the toxin per se, making the animal test even more unreliable, in addition to being incredibly inhumane.

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There is already an approved botulinum type B drug for cervical dystonia. The incremental advantage from engineering a putatively more effective version is miniscule and certainly disproportionate with the amount of suffering caused.

I am shocked to learn that the Boston Children’s Hospital is conducting experiments on rats and mice to test botulinum B toxin in the lab of Dr. Min Dong. The LD50 test, conducted to estimate the amount of toxin needed to kill animals, is barbaric and outdated. Animals die slowly by suffocation and/or because they cannot consume food and water. Furthermore, your lab dissected pregnant rats to culture neuronal cells from embryos, rather than use cell lines that are already available to detect botulinum B activity.

There are alternatives to harming and killing animals for detecting botulinum activity, such as cell-based assays. It is vitally important for all labs to utilize or develop alternative methods to animals which have far greater human relevance and are also much more ethical.

Cell-based methods for botulinum neurotoxin A have been available for nearly a decade. If adequate non-animal methods are not available, then it is the responsibility of the laboratory to develop or refine such assays rather than continue using brutal techniques that torture and kill animals. [Front Pharmacol. 2017; 8: 796. PMC5684488].

These studies are even more shocking in that they are completely gratuitous. There is already an approved botulinum type B drug for cervical dystonia. The incremental advantage from engineering a putatively more effective version is miniscule and certainly disproportionate with the amount of suffering caused.

I urge the Boston Children’s Hospital to end botulinum toxin studies on animals and instruct its labs to utilize more up-to-date, non-animal methods.

Please send your letter to Boston Children’s Hospital to demand they stop paralyzing animals to test botulinum toxin and immediately employ the cell-based assay that was developed for this purpose.

INFORMATION

CAARE’s investigative team has revealed that Boston Children’s Hospital is killing mice and rats to develop an enhanced version of botulinum toxin, a product already in widespread use for cosmetic and medical use. More commonly recognized by one of its commercial names (Botox), botulinum toxin has a number of medical uses, including relief from migraines and nerve-related disorders.

These live animal tests at Boston Children’s Hospital are deadly, harrowing and completely unnecessary.

Since 2011 scientists have developed an in vitro alternative to using mice and rats to study the safety and efficacy of botulinum toxin. Called the cell-based assay, it is considered superior to the mouse test, especially when investigating the cellular and intracellular effect of the toxin.

Inexplicably, some scientists at Boston Children’s Hospital are still using barbaric animal tests. In one phase of the test, researchers dissected pregnant rats and removed their living embryos so they could extract cortical neurons from their brains.

Another phase involved the egregious LD50 test, which injects enough toxin to determine which dose causes death in 50% of the animals. Botulinum toxin, which causes muscle paralysis, was injected into mice to test for local and systemic paralysis.

Systemic paralysis causes a slow death as it gradually affects the respiratory muscles, causing mice to gasp hopelessly for air. Some will die by asphyxiation, but other mice will die because they cannot reach food or water. Their death is the result of dehydration and weight loss, and not the toxin per se, making the animal test even more unreliable, in addition to being incredibly inhumane.

The mice that don’t painfully die from dehydration, starvation or suffocation are killed when the experiment is done.

It is inexcusable that Boston Children’s Hospital is subjecting mice and rats to such intense suffering when an alternative exists that is not just effective, but superior.

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Thank you for everything you do for animals!

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