Modernizing the Models and Tools Used to Develop and Test New Drugs
An Alternatives to Animal Testing, Experimentation and Dissection Article from All-Creatures.org

FROM Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine
December 2021

Thanks to innovation, creativity, and dedication, many scientists have developed new approaches that do not use animals. These human-specific approaches are more relevant to humans because they utilize human cells, tissues, and data, and allow researchers to model complexity and population diversity in ways that animal testing never could. Examples include advanced methods that are available for use today, like organs-on-chips, reconstructed tissue models, and computer simulations, as well as methods in development that use patient-specific information to create virtual digital patients.

Dogs, mice, rats, nonhuman primates, cats, rabbits, pigs, guinea pigs, and other animals all make the list. These animals undergo painful experiments that would be prosecutable as cruelty if they occurred outside the protected walls of scientific laboratories.
One could make a purely ethical argument for change, but there are valid reasons to abandon animal pharmaceutical testing beyond ethics alone. Human patients need safe and effective medications. Most human diseases have no treatment, despite billions of research dollars spent year after year. When effective treatments are developed, many include a long list of undesirable side effects.

The FDA and the pharmaceutical industry recognize that it is time to do better than animal tests; they both acknowledge the need for human-specific approaches to study human outcomes. Moving from acknowledgement to acceptance of human-specific approaches in lieu of animal tests requires action from all stakeholders.

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Please read the ENTIRE ARTICLE HERE (PDF).

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