Animal Testing Perspective

To better understand animal research and why researchers make a clear distinction between research and animal testing, I spoke with Dr Karin Blumer of Novartis. This is a summary of our conversation.

What is animal research?

Research is the use of animals as a model, to better understand how the body works, how diseases affect it and find ways to influence the cause of the disease. This is essentially different to testing. The biomedical community use more than 80% of the total number of lab animals in this way, even though the overall number of  lab animals used is still much lower than 30 to 40 years ago , the numbers have grown in recent years.

How are researchers using animals to research?

Researchers look for an animal that has a disease similar to man, either naturally occurring, for example blindness in dogs, or which can be introduced by changing the animals’ environment or through genetic modification. For example to understand how anxiety effects health, we induce stress in mice to see how their hearts beat, how it affects their vision and breathing. To understand how cancer works, we alter genes in mice, so they automatically develop cancer after a certain time. Alternatively we use normal mice and transplant a human tumor into them to see how it develops over time.

Why are mice used so often?

They are small, easy to house with a short breeding cycle, which enables researchers to see many generations in a relatively short period of time. Unlikely many other animals, mice are easier to manipulate genetically.

Are mice really that similar to humans?

In terms of testing, a human is not a 60kg mouse. Testing in mice is valid but not the perfect model. However evolution is quite conservative; 90% of the genes of a mouse and the genes of a human are identical making them a very valid model.

It’s hard to believe a zebra fish is a good human model…

Fish are vertebrates too. The more you go into genetics and embryology you can learn a lot from fish to understand when a gene mutates, especially as their embroyos are transparent. If you look at an embryo of a mouse, fish, cow and man on a metabolic level during embryonic development, until the second or third week of pregnancy there isn’t much difference between them. Nature doesn’t reinvent itself; it improves existing ‘material’.

Why are we still using monkeys in research?

Academics and neuroscientists use monkeys in research when they try to understand how the brain is wired. Industry also uses monkeys for testing vaccines and hormones (biologics) as these interfere with the immune system. Unlike genetic studies, the immune system in humans is quite different from that of a dog or a mouse. So vaccines have to be tested in a non-human primate.

What would happen if we simply stopped research with animals?

If we phase out animal research there would be no suitable alternative to understanding disease mechanisms. You can’t mimic this in a computer model, at least not today. Many people have tried without animals, but it doesn’t work. It’s even getting more complex, and the number of animals will rise, because we have many more scientific questions to address.

In former times we only looked at genes, but we have now discovered epigenetics. This looks at how the body turns genes on and off during a lifetime. We have learnt that those ‘switches’ can be inherited. For example fasting periods in early adulthood can have an effect on your grandchildren leading to diabetes. This kind of research can’t be done in humans, for time or ethical reasons.

Why are woman who have children less likely to get breast cancer? We know it but we don’t know why? What is happening to make people with Huntington’s disease gene become sick and die at 45 years old? Or Alzheimer’s, we can see what’s happening to the brain, but we don’t understand the mechanism behind it and unless we understand that we can’t find a cure or prevention.

How can we motivate researchers to look for alternative methods?

Researchers don’t get a budget to do animal studies, they get a budget to develop research as fast as possible, as safely as possible and as predicatively as possible to find a cause of a disease. Researchers choose their method of research selecting the most effective route that is also the quickest and cheapest. By law, they are not allowed to use animals in their research if an alternative method is available. Moreover, if there’s a way to do research outside the animal model they will, because using animals in research is more expensive and takes longer.

Do we need to continue medical research to find cures or preventive therapies for today’s and tomorrow’s illnesses and diseases?

The argument that we should just stop research and die at some age of something naturally…. what is nature? What is a natural life without therapy? Does it start with vaccines? Or when we use antibiotics? Or when we start using chemotherapy against cancer? The general public want to get healthier and grow older healthier, so industry and academia are following a societal mandate.

Women dying of breast cancer today aren’t old they are mothers raising kids. Nor are men with prostate cancer. People of all ages have allergies and asthma, plus with the impact of global warming, diseases like malaria will return to Europe. Advancing medical knowledge and therapy is a civil society choice. This isn’t something that industry can answer, this is something that society needs to answer and civil society is very clear; they want it.

Also read:

Zebrafish at the cutting edge of heart research

How did we arrive at the 3 Rs: Replacement, Reduction, Refinement?