Comments on: Jane Goodall: Just Say No To Animal Testing

By: Nathan

Nathan — Wed, 28 May 2008 19:07:37 +0000

No, of course not. No one advocates the needless killing of animals. However, in drug-discovery there just aren’t any viable alternatives. One success story I’m aware of is cassette dosing for PK analysis. This technology enables the use of fewer animals to get the same results. However, in practice, it has simply resulted in greater numbers of compounds to getting tested using the same number of animals. Either way you look at it, it’s a big step forward.

Computer modeling can barely grasp the interactions of a single molecule with a single protein target. It’s hard to imaging that computer modeling is going to do much good for in-vivo work (although it might help us narrow down our selection of molecules that we choose to move into animals).

By: James

James — Wed, 28 May 2008 18:29:37 +0000

Nathan, Goodall is not a pharmaceutical expert. She has an agenda to push. Anyone who believes otherwise is foolish, so I don’t put stock in her particular conclusions.

However, I think that there is value in investigating and finding alternative methods. We may never eliminate animal testing altogether, but companies should do more to reduce the number used, from both a p.r. standpoint, and a total cost standpoint (using computer modeling, over time, will be cheaper than feeding and housing thousands of animals).

Do you disagree?

By: Nathan

Nathan — Wed, 28 May 2008 18:11:28 +0000

A few observations:
1) I wonder if Jane Goodall advocates a ban on medications that were developed using animal testing. That would make for an interesting situation.
2) “studies that found that animal testing was not able to predict the effect of drugs on humans in 50 to 99 percent of cases.” Remember that this statement is very misleading. Compounds that fail in animals are typically never tested in humans. Therefore the real predictive value is not known — it could actually be very high.
3) Goodall says: “no sharp line can be drawn between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom.” If that’s the case, then how can she argue that the predictive value of animal studies is so low? You can’t have it both ways.