Medical research’s animal problem
November 2, 2016:
Are guinea pigs in short supply?
Supply
is not the problem. But substance is.
Explain please…
This
week, New Scientist, carried an editorial that pointed towards a
critical issue dogging medical research. The article, ‘Man or mouse? Why drug
research has taken the wrong turning’, warns that medical experiments are
obsessed with genetically modified animals and have lost touch with human
diseases. Which means, we are not sure if the experiments we do in, say,
genetically modified mice will help us find drugs that work in our body.
What’s the experience so far?
Not
so promising. Medical experts such as Joseph Garner say the benefits to humans
in certain diseases and mouse models have shrunk to such low levels that it’s
time we found better ways to work with animals in medical research. In 2013,
Elias Zerhouni, former head of NIH said the scientific community had moved away
from studying disease in humans.
Oh, what was his point?
That
the ability to remove or replace specific genes in lab animals causes a shift
in focus — from people to animals. So, according to Zerhouni, we must stop this
and refocus on methodologies for use in humans. Only this approach can help the
medical community understand “disease biology” in humans. And only such
approaches can help us find solutions to the medical problems we have.
Interesting, but did the research
community pay heed to this at least in the US?
Looks
like they didn’t. New Scientist says little has changed. It quotes
Garner who asked why so few new drugs that get into clinical trials actually
make it to the market. He says that one important contributor to this problem
is that animal models do not genuinely model human disease.
How bad is the scene?
Granted,
there have been huge advances in the last 60 years of commercial drug research
and development. But the number of new drugs approved per billion dollars spent
on R&D has halved every nine years since 1950. Garner says only about 1 in
9 drugs that reaches human testing phase after having been tested on animals
makes it to the market. Even this number is declining. This should make the
research community think because it takes some $2 billion to bring one drug to
the market, courtesy failed trials on humans.
You mean these drugs fail because they
don’t work on humans as efficiently as testing on animals had predicted?
Precisely.
To give an example, cognitive conditions is an area where research relies
heavily on GM animals. These animals are modified into displaying traits that
match ailments such as Parkinson’s or autism. But as it turns out, what ails
these animals may not (necessarily) affect humans. So, the moral of the story
is humanity is benefiting little from animal research now. And, obviously, the
money that it needs to take a drug to the market nearly doubles every 10 years.
This should change.
How?
New
Scientist has a
solution: start conducting experiments on animals as if they were human trials.
Which means they should have the levels of variety that are seen in human
populations. This is important because the use of GM animals in biomedical
research is only increasing and new gene-editing tools have made creating such
animals with altered characters much easier and cheaper.
So,
it is imperative such aberrations are addressed as soon as possible because
costlier research means waste of money and increases the transmission lag
between research and reality.
Source | The Hindu | 3 November 2016
Regards
Pralhad
Jadhav
Senior
Manager @ Library
Khaitan
& Co
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