Our biological similarities allow for human conditions to be modeled in animals. However, choosing an animal model can be challenging for scientists since there are some genetic and physiological differences between species, just as people differ from one another.
Moreover, animal models of human diseases are only as good as our understanding of that human disease at a given time. Since science is an evolving process, each animal model of a condition furthers our basic biological understanding and may contribute to future therapeutic advancements.
Importantly, those future therapeutic advances may not be obvious when the basic research that ultimately underpins it is undertaken. Animal research is an umbrella term for the vast array of scientific research that goes on — ranging from studying animal behaviour in the wild to understanding disease in an animal in the lab.
The types of research that occurs in labs are similarly varied, including modelling disease, understanding physiology and genetics, the development of human and veterinary treatments and more.
These tests tend to be necessary for regulatory approval, before a drug can move through to future safety stages such as human testing , and tend to come after the compound has been shown to be safe in non-animal tests.
In every university or research institution in Europe and North America there is some form of review panel that must approve new research projects, ensuring they adhere to the 3Rs principle.
In the US, this review panel is known as the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee that supervises every research project and makes sure that it complies with this requirement.
Nevertheless, completely eliminating animal research without compromising the whole biomedical research enterprise is not currently possible. Russell and Burch, who developed the 3Rs framework, wrote :. The progress of replacement is gradual, nor is it ever likely to absorb the whole of experimental biology.
Computer modeling, micro-dosing, MRI scanning and in vitro testing are often touted as alternatives to the use of live animals. However, it is highly doubtful that they will ever completely replace the use of animals in research. The reason for this is that every scientific method is designed to answer a particular type of question , so that methods that use animals, cell cultures, computer models or imaging of the human body, complement rather than replace each other.
For example, computer modelling can only be done if we already have information to put in the model. There is no way of acquiring this information other than going into a living organism to look for it. In vitro experiments, which are done with molecules like proteins or DNA or cell cultures, are very good to unravel mechanisms that happen inside the cell, but are not always so useful to find out, for example, how different cells, tissues and organs interact inside the body.
For the foreseeable future, we will need to use live animals to answer some of the most important scientific questions related to human health. Further, research aimed at producing new knowledge about the behaviour, biology, brain, and other systems and processes in other animals will always depend on studies of those animals.
The species of animal that is selected for a particular biomedical experiment is determined by the specific goals of the experiment, the knowledge we have about that animal species and how it compares to the condition in humans we are modeling.
For example, the pig is a model that is commonly used to study how heart attacks myocardial infarction occur and how they can be treated because the blood vessels that supply the heart in pigs is very much like that in humans.
That means no legal permission to experiment on them is needed and they are not included in any statistics. Animals used in experiments are usually bred for this purpose by the laboratory or in breeding facilities.
We believe that all animals are equally important. A dog bred for research is still a dog who could otherwise live a happy life in a loving home. Some monkeys are still trapped in the wild in Africa, Asia and South America to be used in experiments or imprisoned in breeding facilities. Their children are exported to laboratories around the world. The use of wild-caught monkeys in experiments is generally banned in Europe but is allowed elsewhere.
HSI believes that complete transparency about animal use is vital and that all animals bred, used or killed for the research industry should be included in official figures. See some animal use statistics. For nearly a century, drug and chemical safety assessments have been based on laboratory testing involving rodents, rabbits, dogs, and other animals.
Aside from the ethical issues they pose—inflicting both physical pain as well as psychological distress and suffering on large numbers of sentient creatures—animal tests are time- and resource-intensive, restrictive in the number of substances that can be tested, provide little understanding of how chemicals behave in the body, and in many cases do not correctly predict real-world human reactions.
Trying to mirror human diseases or toxicity by artificially creating symptoms in mice, dogs or monkeys has major scientific limitations that cannot be overcome.
Very often the symptoms and responses to potential treatments seen in other species are dissimilar to those of human patients. As a consequence, nine out of every 10 candidate medicines that appear safe and effective in animal studies fail when given to humans. Drug failures and research that never delivers because of irrelevant animal models not only delay medical progress, but also waste resources and risk the health and safety of volunteers in clinical trials.
The sequencing of the human genome and birth of functional genomics, the explosive growth of computer power and computational biology, and high-speed robot automation of cell-based in vitro screening systems, to name a few, has sparked a quiet revolution in biology. Together, these innovations have produced new tools and ways of thinking that can help uncover exactly how chemicals and drugs disrupt normal processes in the human body at the level of cells and molecules.
From there, scientists can use computers to interpret and integrate this information with data from human and population-level studies. The resulting predictions regarding human safety and risk are potentially more relevant to people in the real world than animal tests. The wider field of human health research could benefit from a similar shift in paradigm.
Many disease areas have seen little or no progress despite decades of animal research. Some million people currently suffer from asthma, yet only two types of treatment have become available in the last 50 years. The results of studies on animals are of limited use in assessing the value of health treatments for humans, and the vast majority of drugs tested on animals prove to be ineffective for treating human disease.
This means millions of dollars are currently wasted on testing drugs that will end up being proven useless. Despite the millions of animal lives that are lost every year in support of scientific research, the results of these experiments often do not translate reliably to human subjects. Not only do 90 percent of drugs that are successful in animal trials fail when applied to human volunteers, there is also a high likelihood that many drugs that fail during animal trials would have been successful in treating human disease.
More than 40 countries, including Australia, Mexico, and Norway limit or outright ban animal testing for cosmetics. Animal testing in biomedical research is standard practice for researchers across the globe. Specific regulations and laws pertaining to animal testing differ from country to country.
A similarity among several countries is that they work to align with the 3 Rs replacement, reduction, and refinement. That is to say that most laws, guidelines, and regulations encourage researchers to replace animal subjects with alternative models when applicable, reduce the number of animals being used for a study, and refine their methods to reduce suffering. Animal testing for cosmetic purposes has already been banned in several countries, but testing on animals in biomedical research is still largely standard practice.
There are several alternatives to animal testing that researchers can employ in place of using animal subjects. In vitro testing is done outside of a living organism on cells, tissues, or organs. Research has suggested that in vitro testing may be more effective than animal testing at providing rapid, precise, and relevant results in certain cases. Computer models have been shown to be as or more effective than animal models in some experimental circumstances.
Using human volunteers in the initial stages of research must be done with caution. There are a number of examples of communities being taken advantage of in medical research.
Globalization of human-subject research has led to pharmaceutical companies and academic institutions recruiting volunteers from lower-income countries at an increasing rate.
0コメント