World Day for Laboratory Animals is tomorrow and today it has been announced that more than 60 companies, organizations, and people, including academics and celebrities, have signed a new Declaration for Advanced Science, which advocates for accelerating the move away from testing on animals to more human-relevant research methods.
“For the benefit of science, human health and animal welfare, we need to move away from the misleading use of animals in research and towards advanced and more relevant alternatives, ” Animal Defenders International (ADI) President Jan Creamer said in a statement sent to WAN.
Celebrity supporters include Joanna Lumley, James Cromwell, Mena Suvari, Chris Packham, Gemma Atkinson, and Benjamin Zephaniah among many others.
“It’s time to leave animal tests, and the needless suffering they involve in the past, where they belong,” stated Cromwell, a longtime animal welfare advocate. “I support Animal Defenders International and a move toward methods of research that are kinder and far more relevant to humans.”
As previously reported by WAN, due to the many differences of species, animals respond differently to certian drugs and chemicals, and are therefore an unreliable way to predict certain effects in humans.
It has been estimated that more than 90% of drugs that prove promising in animal trials fail in human trials, either due to lack of effectiveness, or safety concerns, and that approximately 50% of drugs being taken by the wider public are later withdrawn from the market.
Instead of these misleading animal tests, ADI urges governments and regulators to drive research toward modern methods that benefit people. These include using databases, human tissue culture, sophisticated analytical techniques, microdosing, computer simulations, human tissue and 3D cell cultures.
According to ADI, the latest figures reflect that more than 792,000 animals are used in laboratories in the United States, although this figure excludes mice and rats, which are estimated to account for 95% of all experiments and tens of millions of animals.
