By Jessica Scott-Reid
Jessica is a Canadian writer, animal advocate and plant-based food expert. Her work appears regularly in media across Canada and the US.
The use of animal models in the development of treatments, drugs and vaccines for humans has long been considered a must, an accepted and expected necessity, ethically, scientifically, and even culturally. This is all despite the fact that over 90% of drugs proven to be safe and effective in animal models fail in human clinical trials. Dr. Charu Chandrasekera, founder and executive director of the Canadian Centre for Alternatives to Animal Methods (CCAAM) at the University of Windsor, calls animal testing “a profound waste”: a waste of time, a waste of money, a waste of animal lives, and even wasteful for the environment.
And now, as we see the expedited rollout of various COVID-19 vaccines, questions surrounding the need and efficacy of animal models are only increasing.
Chandrasekera explains that the use of animal models in biomedical research has become ingrained in the field. “We have a scientific culture that relies heavily on animal testing. We’ve had it for over a century now,” she says, “even in the face of evidence showing that animal models are not equivalent to human disease conditions nor do they reflect human responses accurately.” As a result of this misdirected focus, tens of millions of animals are used in testing each year in North America, costing billions of dollars, and resulting in very little scientific progress.
“In the US, a major roadblock to medical innovation is FDA red tape that forces pharmaceutical companies to waste years of time and millions of dollars on painful, misleading and outdated drug tests,” says Justin Goodman, vice president of advocacy and public policy at tax payer watchdog group, White Coat Waste Project, “and doesn’t allow them to use more modern and efficient research tools.” Goodman adds, “these burdensome government-mandated tests on dogs and other animals fail to predict human drug outcomes 95 percent of the time, causing promising drugs to be abandoned, and dangerous ones to reach patients.”
There is also the issue of environmental impact. Chandrasekera recalls from her early days working with animal models, the large number who were immediately killed upon being bred because they weren’t the right gender or the right genetic combination. Those animals would not even be included in the list of the tens of millions documented for use in testing each year.
According to a 2014 review in the journal Environments, entitled Review of Evidence of Environmental Impacts of Animal Research and Testing: “evidence demonstrates that their [research animals] use and disposal, and the associated use of chemicals and supplies, contribute to pollution as well as adverse impacts on biodiversity and public health.” The review reports that, “the quantity of energy consumed by research animal facilities is up to ten times more than offices on a square meter basis,” and that the amount of waste produced by animals in labs, as well as the mass incineration of their bodies have noted negative impacts on the environment. Capturing animals from the wild to use in the lab can also threaten biodiversity and ecological balance.
Photo: Rescued from an invasive research lab, this chimpanzee is one of the very few who get released to an animal sanctuary. We Animals Media.
And now, as we cope not only with the rising threat of the climate crisis, we also have the COVID-19 pandemic, which Chandrasekera says has taught us that many longstanding cultural norms can – must — change. The two leaders in developing vaccines for Covid-19, Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna, adopted an entirely new approach, not testing on animals first, but rather running human and animal trials concurrently. “So we can stop doing things the traditional way,” she notes, “and we did it when we were forced into it.”
“The COVID-19 crisis has certainly exposed cracks in the foundation of the current regulatory regime, particularly how mandating slow, expensive and inaccurate animal tests before new drugs can even enter human trials is wasteful and counterproductive,” adds Goodman. “Moderna and Pfizer both quickly got safe and 95% effective coronavirus vaccines into human trials without first completing tests on dogs, monkeys or other animals.” Goodman points out that Moderna’s chief medical officer stated last March: “’I don’t think proving this in an animal model is on the critical path to getting this to a clinical trial.’” He was right.”
Chandrasekera compares this poignant biomedical pivot to another major cultural shift resulting from the pandemic: working from home. “Many companies would not have even entertained such a concept a year ago. But we adjusted and realized it can be even more effective. Let’s apply the same type of principle to biomedical research. What if we had no animals to experiment on? What would we do?”
In her laboratory, Chandrasekera is working to answer exactly that question. She and her team are creating human-based alternatives to animal models using human stem cells and tissues, assembled to form tissue-like structures called organoids, or engineered through 3D-bioprinting. This “disease-in-a-dish” and “organ-on-a-chip” technology she says, will aid in the better understanding of how drugs, treatments and vaccines function with actual human biology, not mouse biology.
These methods could not only further scientific progress, but could also cut down the significant pollution produced by animal testing, as well as save precious time, money and lives currently being wasted by archaic and ineffective models of animal testing.