Please ask your MP to sign Parliament EDM 278, for a science hearing to publicly prove that trying to model humans, using laboratory animals, is like taking your child to the vet: a dangerous act that endangers human life, prosecutable by law.
Examples of the very real human harm and deaths caused by animal modelling include penicillin, which was delayed for humans by over a decade because it has no effect on rabbits. Additional examples are too numerous to name here, for more information please visit this link.
We’re proud to be be supporting Patricia Gibson MP, as she leads the call for this vital science hearing:
Parliament EDM 175 has closed with 110 cross-party MPs calling for its vital public scientific hearing, judged by independent experts from the relevant fields of science.
Thank you Ricky Gervais and all at FLOE for your unwavering support of the urgent need for a rigorous public scientific hearing, on claims animal experiments can predict the responses of human patients.
Thank you @DrLisaCameronMP for #EDM175, which closed with 110 cross-party MPs calling for the science hearing outlined in this film.
Great cross-party MPs gathered at Westminster Hall to debate Peter Egan’s Parliament petition: Change the Law to Include Laboratory Animals in the Animal Welfare Act. Many MPs took the opportunity to underline the urgent need for the EDM 278 public scientific hearing, to prove to the Government that they are being misled by a financial vested interest in animal experiments which has nothing to do with current medical and scientific knowledge.
Martyn Day MP led the debate, saying “it strikes me as unbelievable that, in this nation of professed animal lovers, laboratory animals are categorically excluded from the 2006 Act. We must not forget that that includes dogs and cats, who many of us take into our homes to love and care for and who enrich our lives. The 2006 Act legalises, for example, the daily force feeding of chemicals directly into the stomachs of factory farmed puppies without pain relief or anaesthetic.”
Government Minister Kit Malthouse MP stated clearly that if laboratory animals were included in the Animal Welfare Act, no animal experiments would be permitted.
Patricia Gibson MP said “what we need, and what my constituents want—what I believe most people across the UK want—is a public scientific hearing on animal experiments. We need a rigorous, public scientific hearing on claims that animals can predict the responses of humans, judged by a panel of truly independent experts from relevant fields of science. Surely, anyone who sincerely believes in scientific research and believes that animal testing is necessary would have no objection to such a public hearing?”
Dr. Lisa Cameron MP said “We really must find the time and place for this scientific hearing. Those who engage in the experiments should not shy away from a scientific hearing, because we will hear from the experts who can take this issue forward. Surely the Government should also support an urgent scientific hearing as a way forward.”
Margaret Ferrier MP said “Gene-based medicine is a rapidly developing science that allows treatment to be completely personalised based on a patient’s DNA. That could not be replicated through animal experimentation. Does the hon. Member agree that this kind of medical science must be prioritised when it comes to research, to avoid unnecessary harm to animals?” Martyn Day MP responded:” I agree entirely. That form of medicine is better not only for animals but for humans as well.”
To watch key clips from this vital Westminster Hall debate, please visit this link.
Dr. Lisa Cameron MP has tabled a crucial new Parliamentary Early Day Motion, EDM 175, calling for the Government to mandate a public scientific hearing – judged by independent experts from the relevant fields of science – on claims that veterinary principles, from animal experiments, should be applied to human patients in medical research and safety testing.
The science hearing will expose and judge false claims about current medical knowledge that maintain the funding of animal experiments; the hearing will enable our Government to become aware that they are being duped by an outdated 173-year-old vested interest, which is today entirely out of step with current medical and scientific understanding.
The EDM cites high profile examples of the failure of animal testing being reported in peer reviewed medical journals, including the British Medical Journal [1]; the FDA – which states that 9 out of 10 new human medicines fails to pass human clinical trials, because animals cannot predict human responses [2]; pharmaceutical companies, whose experts openly acknowledge the failure of animal tests in their drug development process [3] – and the US-based National Cancer Institute, which says we have lost cures for cancer because studies in rodents have been believed [4].
Please ask your MP to sign EDM 175, for a fair and open science hearing to expose and stop the selfish people who’s livelihoods depend upon an outdated method of medical research, which is now proven to be harming and killing human patients. Please simply type in your postcode at this link, to ask your MP to sign the EDM today.
2. FDA Issues Advice to Make Earliest Stages Of Clinical Drug Development More Efficient. FDA, June 18, 2009 2006 [cited March 7, 2010].
3. Extensive quotes, by experts working for the pharmaceutical industry, on the failure of animal models in their drug development process, available here.
4. Gura T: ‘Cancer Models: Systems for identifying new drugs are often faulty’. Science. 1997, 278 (5340): 1041-1042.
A statement has been issued by a charity called ‘Animal Free Research’ (AFR) who promote the most misleading of all the 3Rs – the 1R called ‘replacement with alternatives’.
The 3Rs is an outdated policy established in 1959, for ‘humane experimental technique on animals.’ The 1R promoted by AFR is part of an outdated law which AFR uphold on their website. AFR’s position statement on this web page is indicative of their highly misleading position: ‘Working to create a world where human diseases are cured faster without the use of animals.’ This statement falsely claims that human diseases have been cured by animal experiments in the past, and we just need to drop animals to cure patients faster. This is typical nonsense from the 1R/3Rs community.
Charities, like AFR, claim that by promoting the 1R – replacement with alternatives’ – they are somehow helping human patients. They are not. Firstly: abandoning failure is never dependent upon what else is available. So even if there were no human-based methods, animal experiments should immediately stop because they are now proven to also harm and kill humans. And ‘replacing’ failure with an alternative does not make any sense. Human-based research is not an ‘alternative replacement ‘ for animal experiments – these are opposites, not alternatives for each other.
Cures for human treatments and diseases are being derailed by incompetent charities who are not qualified in this specialist medical science field. By promoting the 1R – which is part of the outdated 3Rs – and by funding animal experimenters to use ‘alternatives’ to a method that kills people, AFR use nonsensical language and an outdated law to provide the basis for their 1R, which states that animal experiments must be used unless there is an ‘alternative.’
AFR should stop funding active invasive animal modellers. They should help us campaign for the immediate abolition of the outdated law upon which their 1R is based, and start supporting our called-for science hearing, as outlined by Parliamentary EDM 250: a hearing to be mandated by the Government and judged by independent experts from the relevant fields of science.
Our Government currently believes that animal experiments save human lives – have saved human lives in the past – and therefore should continue. We urgently need a science hearing to prove to our decision makers that they are being duped by an outdated vested interest, including the 1R community, and that in truth, animal modelling harms and kills humans and must stop now.
For more information please browse our website and watch the filmed conversation between our senior doctor Ray Greek and Ricky Gervais, below; please scroll forward to 25 minutes and 1 second to listen to Dr. Greek speaking about the harm caused to patients by the 1R and 3Rs communities:
Our senior doctor Ray Greek has written an article with finance professor, Lisa Kramer, on how COVID 19 – with its very different effects on different species – represents the perfect illustration of why using animals, to try and predict in advance what will happen to humans, is nothing short of a medical catastrophe for patients.
This article has been shared by highly influential twitter users, including Ricky Gervais, Peter Egan, Dr. Lisa Cameron MP, Dr. Daniel Allen and many more.
A groundbreaking new film featuring Ricky Gervais in conversation with our senior doctor, leading science expert Ray Greek has been launched marking the dawn of a life-saving focus on science and the overwhelming medical evidence against using animals as claimed predictive models of human patients, in medical research and safety testing.
The Labour Party have published their new Animal Welfare Manifesto which impacts on Patients Campaigning for Cures in its final section titled ‘Animals Used in Research’.
We are encouraged to read that this section opens with a pledge to review the 1986 Animals in Scientific Procedures Act (ASPA) and we will be applying to be part of that review.
The ASPA is outdated legislation which permits valuable medical research funding to license experiments on animals, that are claimed able to find treatments and cures for humans. We now know that this claim is entirely false. So the entire ASPA is based on now proven false science.
The 1986 ASPA is outdated because it predates the crucial 2003 Human Genome Project, which provides the final seal on decades of peer reviewed scientific evidence confirming the failure of animal experiments in the search for human treatments and cures. Our piece in the New Statesman explains the significance of the Human Genome project in more detail.
It is ironic that Labour’s Manifesto opens by calling for a review of the outdated ASPA, because the rest of the Manifesto’s text confines itself entirely to the limitations imposed by the ASPA. These limitations are deeply unscientific, falling line with animal modelers and 3Rs’ organisations such as Cruelty Free International and the RSPCA. For example, the Manifesto commits ‘to a stringent review of defined areas in regulatory testing, with the aim of immediately identifying and eliminating avoidable tests.’ This suggests that there are many areas of animal-based toxicity testing which are viable for humans and do not need to be avoided. This in turn ignores the fact that animal-based toxicity testing is now clearly demonstrated to be an unmitigated disaster for human patients. To suggest otherwise is very serious and medically negligent. [1]
The Manifesto also talks about ‘ending within an achievable timeframe, the permitting of ‘severe’ suffering as defined in UK legislation, with a long-term objective to phase out animal testing entirely’. Calling for animal testing to be gradually ‘phased out’ is the stagnant ‘reduction’ aspect of the 3Rs: an outdated policy established in 1959 for ‘humane experimental technique on animals’. The 3Rs entirely ignores the fact 90% of animal testing is now widely reported to be failing in human clinical trials. [2] It ignores the fact that the National Cancer Institute says we have lost cures for cancer because studies in rodents have been believed. [3] And it ignores the British Medical Journal’s report on the failure of animal modeling in the search for human treatments and cures. [4] But above all, it ignores our top science experts who have named Trans-Species Modeling Theory (TSMT) as a water tight scientific Theory to join Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. TSMT explains today how we now understand why animal models are such a failure for human patients. [5]
It seems to us that the Labour Party are still in the grip of outdated advisers who do not address animal experimentation as a claimed medical endeavour for human patients. So-called animal protection organisations have a vested interest in the 3Rs, upon which their campaigns are built over many years. They are doing more harm than good in their grip on great Labour, who established the irreplaceable national treasure which is the NHS.
The good news is that Labour are suggesting a review of the failed 1986 ASPA. This is potentially a very valuable action and we will apply to help Labour understand the scientific aspects of what the ASPA actually represents.
References
1. Lumley CE, Walker S Lancaster, Quay, editors, 1990, ‘Clinical Toxicity – Could it have been predicted? Post-marketing experience’, 57–67; Heywood R. Animal Toxicity Studies: Their Relevance for Man.
2.FDA Issues Advice to Make Earliest Stages Of Clinical Drug Development More Efficient. FDA, June 2006 [cited March 7, 2010].
3. Gura T: ‘Cancer Models: Systems for identifying new drugs are often faulty’. Science. 1997, 278 (5340): 1041-1042.
Human Stakeholders and the Use of Animals in Drug Development
Please watch the brilliant new lecture titled ‘Human Stakeholders and the Use of Animals in Drug Development’, delivered at Toronto University on March 4th, by Professor of finance, Lisa Kramer.
To watch the lecture please visit this link or click the image below:
This lecture shows that: constrained by regulations which date back to WWII, the pharmaceutical industry is being constrained to use animal models in the drug development initiative, which is stopping the development of harmful drugs from reaching the market place – and hindering the development of useful drugs.
If we were to revise the way we regulate the pharmaceutical industry and the entire drug development enterprise this could greatly benefit the human stakeholders – of which patients are those with the most at stake.
The lecture underlines that we have many viable human-based methods that are addressing the personal needs of each individual patient; but even if we had no viable human-based methods we would still have no grounds for continuing to employ animal models. We’d be better off literally tossing a coin to decide which drugs to use for humans, as animals correlate with human outcomes less than 50% of the time. Cherry picking data, after the event, ignores the fact that there’s no way you’re going to know which animals will be predictive for humans, and which won’t, in advance. Anecdotes are not compelling, the proof is in the mathematics of predictive value.
And because we’re allocating all our resources to the status quo, we don’t know what we might be forgoing had we reallocated those resources to existing cutting edge human-based methods.
Drugs that have been ruled out after animal tests are later discovered accidentally to be useful for humans; for example Fleming discovered penicillin for humans after he saw it fail as an effective treatment of infections in animals. Fleming went on record stating that if animal testing had been required at the time he was developing penicillin, he fears that the “whole field of antibiotics might never have been realized”.
All of the above is underlined by the fact that the number of effective and safe new drugs approved has slowed to a crawl, it’s ‘no greater than it was 50 years ago’, (Munos, 2009, page 259, Nature Reviews Drug Discovery) – and this, despite all the technological advances.
There are also huge financial costs
Sepsis, for which animal models have yielded no effective treatment, costs US hospitals at least 14$billion annually (Mayr and Yende, 2014).
Cancer, coronary artery disease, congestive heart failure, stroke lung disease and other affliction which have been extensively explored with animal models also continue to be extremely costly to treat, with treatment outcomes nevertheless still extremely risky.
The costs of existing successful treatments are considerably inflated in order to underwrite the high costs of animal modeling, most of which fails.
Other stakeholders apart from patients are affected.
It is useful to examine the drug development industry’s costs relative to revenues:
The pharmaceutical industry spends more on R&D than any other industrial sector, (Pham 2010).
The majority of the costs to industry of developing drugs comes from human clinical trials.
The top reason for failure in human clinical trials are safety and efficacy (the very properties animal models are intended to asses)
Drug companies would actually prefer not to be required to do the animal tests. When Prof. Kramer presents her work at pharmaceutical scientists’ conferences they nod their heads “yes we need to bypass this costly and misleading aspect of the development process”.
Other Stakeholders
Clinical trial participants: these are among the first humans exposed to compounds that perhaps appeared safe in animal models, and they often aren’t informed of the significant risks they face based on the methodological problems with animal models.
New generations of scientists: those being trained to continue to employ animal models are missing the opportunity to advance scientific progress through use of better methods.
Tax payer and donors who fund these initiatives
Lower bound on annual cost to society: $10-12 billion of the annual NIH budget directly funds animal-based research at universities.
Non profit charities which use tax payers donations e.g. the for ice bucket challenge, lots of that money directly funded animal-based research.
Investors: constraining drug development firms to employ animal models prevents them from putting investment capital to its best use, and arbitrarily limits the firms’ financial returns.
Why does animal-based research continue?
Laws continue to codify animal models prior to human clinical trials.
The FDA and its counterparts around the world likely has the power to revise these laws but are unlikely to do so without action from legislative bodies.
Other obstacles include conflict of interest, status quo bias (including the 3Rs sector) and various other behavioral tendencies on the part of researchers and the public.
It often takes a better model to replace a model: in this case that effectively means 100% predictive value. Prof. Kramer argues these exist, so instead of looking where it’s easy to look – like the old drunk looking for his keys where the light happens to be, instead of somewhere else where he actually lost them – Prof. Kramer argues this is what we are doing by continuing to use animal models.
Instead we could be using the technology of personalized medicine:
Examples of personalized medicine include genetically matched treatments where we can determine – based on your specific genetic makeup – whether you’re going to have the desired outcome from a drug or an adverse response. Immunotherapy: this is already being used in treating many forms of cancer where the treatment is targeted to the patient’s specific genetic makeup. Microdosing: where we can administer compounds to humans at doses far below therapeutic levels to determine safety and efficacy, at the cellular level. Personalized medicine is literally happening, it’s not some far fetched futuristic idea. At the University of Toronto there’s an example of personalized medicine in action: they’ve grown heart tissue from human stem cells and here you can see the tissue beating in the lab. Scientists can use this to study the effect of potential drug molecules on actual human heart tissue. This can help us determine safety and efficacy, particle implications that could never be possible by looking at animal tissue. This is human technology for human application for human benefit – which is the whole point.
CONCLUSION
Constrained by outdated standards, the pharmaceutical industry is effectively required to employ animal models in early stages of the drug development process.
The reliance on animal models is unable to prevent the development of harmful drugs and is hindering the development of useful drugs.
Humans are significantly harmed, including patients, clinical trial participants, researchers, tax payers and many others.
Elimination of policies and regulations that require the use of animal models will greatly benefit stakeholders of the pharmaceutical industry.
It’s time for the EDM 66 science debate – judged by independent experts from the relevant fields of science.
Human stakeholders – including patients – are being harmed by the claims of vested interest groups, which continue to make huge profits from animal modeling, at the expense of the rest of society.
Decision makers and the public need to be given the opportunity to make an informed decision about current scientific knowledge, and this can be achieved by our called-for medical debate, as outlined by Prof. Kramer and Dr. Ray Greek, in their new book chapter.
PLEASE TAKE ACTION TO HELP!
Please ask your MP to sign the current Parliamentary EDM 66, calling for our science hearing. Simply type in your postcode at this link to send your MP a letter now!
Animal experiments are sold to society as a claimed scientific endeavour, so it is absolutely vital to make sure correct and up-to-date scientific language is employed to oppose this non-scientific practice, which is now proven to also cause harm and fatalities to human patients.
Animal protection organisations are actually getting in the way of abolishing animal testing, because they don’t work with science experts who are sufficiently qualified in this highly specialist medical field. We’d like those animal protectionists to work with our experts.
Cruelty Free International, for example, have a page where they say animal testing must be replaced with ‘alternatives’. Calling for animal testing – now proven to cause harm and fatalities to humans – to be replaced with an ‘alternative’ is clearly conceptual linguistic nonsense. Human-based research is viable – not an alternative: animal testing fails patients, human-based research saves lives. These are opposites, not alternatives. Words have meanings, and in science those meanings have far reaching, life and death consequences.
Calling for animal tests to be replaced with ‘alternatives’ is part of an outdated system called the 3Rs – the National Centre for 3Rs , for ‘humane experimental technique on animals’ – and the Animals in Scientific procedures Act, which falsely holds that animal experiments do have predictive value for humans and that these experiments must continue “unless there is an alternative”.
The main PR organisation for animal experiments, ‘Understanding Animal Research’, has a page dedicated to the 3Rs and replacing animals with ‘alternatives’.
Cruelty Free International also claims that the stress of animals in labs will affect the ability of animals to predict the responses of human patients: ‘stress inherent to laboratory life and experiments affects not just welfare but also the reliability and human relevance of results’. This is not true. Animals cannot predict human responses because of millions of years of evolution which separates them from the animals in question – and all that that this brings to bear on species differences and their impact on complexity science principles in genetics and complex systems. For more on this please visit Trans Species Modeling Theory (Drs. Shanks and Greek) and watch the science lecture by our senior doctor, below:
To end animal experiments, animal protectionists need to understand that they are playing with patients’ lives when they get the science wrong – and they are playing into the hands of the animal experimentation community, who need the 3Rs and sloppy science to survive.
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