The time has come to stop testing drugs on animals and start using better, more modern methods

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Who suffers from the continued reliance on animal models?

Alike animals, humans are derived complex systems. Just because we humans are made up of complementary divisions it doesn't mean those divisions are acting in harmony in a specie and behave correspondingly in another when dug up to a treatment but frequently they don't. Different species are evolved from different starting conditions, giving rise to differences that are unpredictable, the way we respond to drugs can be different from the way the animals respond to drugs, even when the is of Chimpanzees and Humans where they share a great deal of DNA.


Patients suffer when drugs that appeared safe in animals end up hurting humans or being ineffective for Humans. It can be explained with the help of example, the painkiller Vioxx was linked to tens of thousands of heart attacks in humans after being deemed not only safe in animals but also beneficial to the heart.

Scientists have rectified cancer in mice enormous times, and yet there is no cure of cancer for humans. In like manner, about a thousand of vaccines are cured HIV-like viruses in animals but none of them work in humans. And more than a hundred drugs are there to treat Lou Gehrig's disease, again those drugs are suitable for animals but not humans. Sometimes scientists accidentally stagger on successful treatments that were previously rejected due to lack of constructive results from animal models, as happened with both polio and the penicillin vaccine. Ineptly, because of failures in animal testing, it took many years and countless deaths ahead the recognition of the therapeutic value of polio and the penicillin vaccine.

Modern techniques like microdosing allows researchers to find out compounds which are innocuous for humans. On the same hand Personalized Medicine allows the development of treatments which are specially made to each individual's unique genetic makeup. It takes more of emergence and a little bit of rapidity, if only regulatory agencies would release drug developers from the misleading and costly requirement to test new entities on vertebrates and before making these animals accessible for testing in humans.





Roza Palv
Program Manager- Pharm Chem 2018

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