Experts in the wider scientific community, outside the animal-based research sector, openly agree that laboratory animal models are now demonstrated to hold no predictive value for human patients. Parliamentary EDM 25 enables MPs to call for medical evidence to be heard, which will prove beyond doubt that animal experiments are failing the search for human treatments and cures and should be abandoned without delay.
The EDM calls for the Government to mandate a rigorous public scientific hearing, judged by independent experts from the relevant science fields, to stop the false claims about human medicine which continue to fund animal testing.
The EDM's hearing is crucial because 75% of all animal experiments are sanctioned under the guise of predictive value for human patients.
The EDM's hearing is unique and historic because a panel of expert scientists will judge its outcome, including experts from the fields of clinical medicine, complexity/chaos theory, philosophy of science, evolutionary biology, clinical research, drug development and basic research. The EDM calls for the hearing to be mandated by the Government, to achieve a scientific ruling and ban a 70-year-old outdated law that still requires animal testing, despite its now proven medical failure for humans.
Experts in the wider scientific community, outside animal-based researchers, agree that animal models are now demonstrated to hold no predictive value for humans.
The FDA states that nine out of ten new human medicines fail in human/clinical trials, because animals cannot predict human responses. [1]
Leading scientific journals are reporting on the failure of animal models, including The British Medical Journal which published its Editor's Choice in June 2014, titled How Predictive and Productive is Animal Research? [2] This article concluded by quoting from the paper it cited: 'If research conducted on animals continues to be unable to reasonably predict what can be expected in humans, the public’s continuing endorsement and funding of preclinical animal research seems misplaced'.
Pharmaceutical companies openly acknowledge the failure of animal models in their drug development process, and write about this often in the scientific literature, please visit this link for more.
Current understanding of evolutionary biology and complexity means that a rapidly growing number of internationally respected experts are warning about the dangers of the continued use of animal models [3-5].
Award winning oncologist Dr Azra Raza, director of the MDS Centre at Columbia University, stated the following in her TEDx talk “One of the reasons is that our system for developing drugs for cancer is essentially broke. We CAN and SHOULD do better! I am here on this stage today really because of the mouse. Earlier this year I pointed out that one of the reasons we are not developing novel therapies for cancer fast enough is that we have been relying too much on animal models. I've been getting hate mails since then, but the fact of the matter is that we cured acute myeloid leukemia in mice back in 1977 and in humans to day we are using the same drugs with absolutely dreadful results. We have to stop studying mice because it is essentially pointless and we have to start studying freshly obtained human cells".
The National Cancer Institute says we have lost cures for cancer because studies in rodents have been believed. [6]
Possibly the most famous example of all, penicillin, was delayed for humans by over a decade because it has no effect on rabbits. Alexander Fleming said this about animal testing:‘How fortunate we didn’t have these animal tests in the 1940’s, for penicillin would probably never have been granted a license and the whole field of antibiotics might never have been realised.’[7]
The purification of penicillin, by Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, helped it become the miracle cure that has saved millions of lives. Here is Howard Florey on the toxicity tests he used: ‘Mice were used in the initial toxicity tests because of their small size, but what a lucky chance it was for in this respect man is like the mouse and not the guinea pig. If we had used guinea pigs exclusively we should have said that penicillin was toxic and we probably should not have proceeded to try and overcome the difficulties of producing the substance for trial in man.'[8]
Today, Drs. Greek and Shanks have named Trans-Species Modeling Theory, which is akin to the Theory of Relativity and Theory of Evolution, in that it places decades of practical examples within a wider context - in our case evolutionary biology and complexity science - to explain how and why animals have always failed as predictive models of humans - and always will fail.
'A Public Scientific Hearing on Animal Experiments' is presented by For Life On Earth (FLOE), the science-based campaign highlighted in EDM 25.
Our vision is to effect the immediate abandonment of experiments on sentient animals. These experiments not only injure and destroy animals but are now proven to cause alarming harm and fatalities to humans, delaying the arrival of treatments and cures.
References
1. FDA Issues Advice to Make Earliest Stages Of Clinical Drug Development More Efficient. FDA, June 2006 [cited March 7, 2010].
2.BMJ 2014;348:g3719 available here
3. Shanks N, Greek R Animal Models in Light of Evolution Boca Raton: Brown Walker Press; 2009
4. Shanks N, Greek R, Greek J: Are Animal Models Predictive for Humans? Philos Ethics Humanit Med 2009, 4:2,
5. 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.
6.Gura T: Cancer Models: Systems for identifying new drugs are often faulty. Science. 1997, 278 (5340): 1041-1042.
7. Parke DV: Clinical Pharmacokinetics in Drug Safety Evaluation. ATLA 1994, 22:207-209.
8. Florey H: The advance of chemotherapy by animal experiment. Conquest 1953, 41:12.