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Every one of us and every one of our patients or customers who has ever received a licensed medicine has directly benefited from animal research.
Indeed, the demand for new or improved treatments has not abated, and
recent health scares have highlighted that the public expect increasingly
greater safety from the medicines they use. Yet the use of animals for
medical research is under scrutiny like never before.
Animal rights activists advocate a total ban on the use of experimental
animals, and are happy to use a range of intimidatory tactics to force
this issue. These tactics appear to be working as the scientific and
medical communities have risked losing the argument by their silence.
As pharmacists, we are in a unique position to inform this debate; we
understand both the regulatory framework that demands animal experiments
to ensure safety, and the history of drug development that demonstrates
how this has been put to good use. But, crucially, we are also in constant
contact with the general public, for whom the link between the medicines
they take and the use of animals in research has not always been made
clear.
The use of animals in scientific research is highly regulated in the
UK. The principle legislation is the Animals (Scientific Procedures)
Act 1986, which was designed around the central philosophy of the “3Rs” — reduction,
refinement and replacement. In other words, animals should only be used
if there is no alternative (replacement), and when they are used, all
efforts must be made to reduce the numbers used, and to refine techniques
to cause the minimum potential for adverse effects. There are three levels
of control: (i) the establishment where the research is to be conducted
must have a licence, termed the “certificate of designation”,
(ii) the programme of work itself must be authorised in the form of a
project licence that includes exactly how experiments will be performed,
their scientific justification and what steps will be taken to minimise
adverse effects, and (iii) the individuals carrying out the experiments
must each be authorised, ie, a personal licence, which is only granted
if the appropriate training requirements are met.
All these layers come under the scrutiny of the Home Office Animals (Scientific
Procedures) Inspectorate, which can, and does, visit scientific establishments
on a regular basis without warning.
The fact we have such tight safeguards in the UK is principally thanks
to pressure by animal welfare organisations, constantly pushing for better
standards of care for the animals in our scientific establishments. As
scientists, we are all in favour of implementing the highest quality
of animal welfare, since only animals free from distress and suffering
will provide reliable scientific results. Therefore the argument is not
against animal welfare or animal rights, but against the extremists,
such as the Animal Liberation Front, that advocate violence against people
and property in an attempt to scare the scientific community into submission.
As a result, many scientists are too intimidated to stand up in public
for their research because of the risk of becoming a target.
Even the pharmaceutical industry has traditionally been reticent to speak
out. Rather than stand up to these tactics, the industry has instead
suggested that it may have to stop all animal research in the UK if the
current political climate does not improve. Although this would be a
symbolic victory for the animal extremists, it would not be a victory
for animal welfare. The UK has some of the most stringent animal welfare
legislation in the world and, if the experiments go elsewhere, we lose
this important safeguard.
Perhaps, at last, the tide is turning. For the first time there has been
an organised demonstration campaigning in support of animal research.
Almost 800 people turned up in Oxford on 25 February to show their support
for the building of the new Oxford animal biomedical research building.
This £18m animal facility is currently under construction, and
will bring together many small departmental animal units into one state-of-the-art
facility that will improve animal welfare. It is projected that 98 per
cent of the animals housed there will be rodents or fish. Despite this,
there has been a vociferous campaign against building this facility that
has included arson attacks on university property and intimidation of
the building contractors. In the current climate, it is therefore of
little surprise that the 16-year-old boy who organised the pro-building
demonstration has already received death threats. Indeed, the animal
extremists now say that everyone with a connection to Oxford University — all
students, employees, contractors and their families — are now a
legitimate target.
So why should we stand up and be counted? Surely the status quo will
continue regardless of what we as pharmacists say and do. With so few
speaking up for animal research while so many depend on it, to be mute
on this issue is to risk losing the argument, and the consequences would
be grave.
Imagine a world where the debate over animal use for experimentation
has been won by the extremists. The public would still demand the highest
standards of drug safety. Human experimentation for new bioactive agents
would be dangerous and may be perceived as too great a risk. Meanwhile,
alternative in vitro and in silico technologies are still in their infancy
and cannot mimic the complex interactions of multiple organ systems in
vivo; even if they could, they would still require initial validation
using experiments on animals. Drug development would effectively grind
to a halt.
With major health care challenges such as malaria, AIDS and tuberculosis
still killing millions worldwide, it is clear that the only way we will
tackle these conditions in the future is to follow the pattern of drug
development that has provided so many advances in the past, ie, through
the powerful tool of using animals as a model system for human disease.
It is not something that scientists enjoy having to do, nor is it something
to undertake lightly, but for the foreseeable future the use of animals
for medical research remains an absolute necessity and something worth
defending.
A small minority of pharmacists may strongly disagree with these sentiments
but, given that the major foundations of our profession are built on
data obtained from animal research, to do so is barely compatible with
membership of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society. I believe that, as pharmacists,
we have a moral duty to inform the debate and to do anything less is
hypocritical. |
The
Pharmaceutical Journal