What do multiple myeloma, influenza, advanced breast cancer, atrial fibrillation, thyroid cancer, ear infection, advanced ovarian cancer and obesity all have in common? One commonality is obvious – they cause suffering, sickness and sometimes death in people around the world. Another commonality is less obvious – these are each conditions that are now being treated with new drugs just approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the past three months alone. That’s right… in the period from Thanksgiving 2014 until now, new drugs that treat each of these conditions have become available, and these agents will be used to treat the illnesses that may affect millions of Americans. Eventually, they will likely have enormous worldwide impacts on these diseases. That’s something to be thankful for.

While some are thankful that the scientific progress is successfully tackling human suffering and disease, others cast doubt on the way that progress is achieved. In a newly published analysis entitled “Trends in animal use at US research facilities” [1], employees of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PeTA) – a self-avowed animal rights organization – report that, amongst the largest research universities in the United States, the number of animals involved in research has grown by over 70% during the past 15 years. In their publication, the authors express alarm over the growing use of animals not covered by the Animal Welfare Act (AWA), mostly mice and fish, in biomedical research, without making any mention of the impact of this research growth.

This growth in animal research in the US is directly linked to an accelerating pace of scientific study and its benefits. A brief visit to the FDA’s “New Drugs at FDA page” makes it quickly apparent that the rate of approval of new medications is astounding. Where is this progress coming from? At least in part, it’s coming from the scientific discoveries that are pouring out of the research laboratories located in colleges and universities, institutes and pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies around the globe. A good example is the innovative BiTE antibody Blincyto (blinatumomab) which was approved for use in treating B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia in December 2014 (clinical evaluation against other cancers is ongoing); as we discussed in a blog post in 2008, animal research – particularly studies in mice – played a key role in its development and early evaluation.

Thanks to the researchers that occupy laboratories around the world, scientific discoveries are coming faster than ever, and all of us benefit. It’s not just that there is more research being done – it’s that the impact of the science is better than ever thanks to more advanced technologies, accumulating knowledge of how the body works and more advanced animals models, including ones that mimic human disease processes in increasingly sophisticated ways that promote new discoveries and new opportunities to develop novel drugs.

Why is the scale of animal research growing in the US? The answer is clear: scientific progress is cumulative. One discovery often enables multiple other lines of work. The discovery of the structure of DNA, for example, enabled thousands of efforts to find the genetic causes of disease. Because of this, successes build on successes and research grows.

What is the consequence of the growth in animal research? The answer is: new treatments, new cures, less sickness and longer, healthier lives.

In their paper, the PeTA employees fail to mention any of the following accomplishments, allow of which resulted from the growing scientific research efforts around the world:

But this isn’t the end. To these existing accomplishments, add the work that was started in the past 15 years and will yet unfold in the forthcoming decade AND the overwhelming progress in basic/fundamental research that will lead to new treatments and cures throughout the first half of the 21st century, and you have the recipe for a growing animal research infrastructure in this country.

As recent statistics from the UK indicate, the increase in the use of mice and fish in research is driven almost entirely by the increasing number of studies that involve the use of genetically-modified (GM) animals. In other words, the increase is driven by scientific and technological advances that had a profound impact on biomedical research over the past 15 years, rather than any desire to avoid using species regulated by the AWA (while mice and fish studied in Universities are not covered by the AWA, research involving them is regulated in multiple ways, including through the federal Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare which issues the PHS Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals).

Growing study of GM animals has occurred because these models are enormously useful. To take just one example, the National Institute of Child Health and Development recently published an online article entitled “It’s in the DNA: Animal Models Offer Clues to Human Development”, discussing the role of animal models in helping to understand human development and developmental disorders. But this is far from the only example, studies in GM mice are key to many of the state-of-the-art emerging fields in biomedical research. These range from the very new areas of optogenetics – which uses light to control activation of individual cells – and gene editing techniques such as CRISPR that have the potential to cure genetic disorders, to new therapies such as cancer immunotherapy and treatments for rare genetic disorders such as progeria and Pompe disease which are being used to successfully treat patients for whom effective therapies were previously unavailable.

The rise in the numbers of zebra fish is also driven by their value as research models. As vertebrates they share over 84% of the genes that cause disease when defective in humans, while their rapid reproduction and transparent eggs make them ideal subjects for genetic and developmental studies. It’s not surprising that they are both an increasingly popular species in basic biomedical research, and in the preclinical evaluation of potential new therapies and of the environmental safety of chemicals.

What the statistics presented by PeTA in their article don’t tell you is that, while the number of experiments and studies have increased, animal research increasingly involves Refined techniques that produce minimized harm to the subjects and Reduced numbers of animals per study. And of course, animal research directly led to the ability to Replace animals in some types of studies, altogether. The efficacy and efficiency of animal research is advancing, and individual discoveries are, on average, being made with fewer animals. That is a fact missed entirely by the PeTA article.

Furthermore, within the concept of refinement is the idea that researchers should use animals that will suffer less in a laboratory setting wherever possible [2]. So replacing a small number of “higher” mammals with a high number of “lower” animals is consistent with the 3Rs principles of animal welfare. PeTA neglect to mention that USDA statistics show a 40% fall in the use of AWA-covered species over the last 15 years, and it is likely that a small proportion of the rise in use of non-AWA covered species is due to technological advances that have allowed non-AWA species (e.g. GM mice) to replace AWA species (e.g. monkeys) in some studies, for example to develop new treatments for HIV/AIDS, in line with the principle of Refinement we have outlined.

Through the implementation of these 3Rs, scientists ensure that they engage in socially-responsible and ethical work. What the authors of the PeTA study should do is to explain how achieving their end goal of a virtual end to animal research, which will reverse the trend of accelerating discovery and medical progress upon which it depends, is ethical or defensible.

Goodman, J., Chandna A., and Roe K. 2015. Trends in animal use at US research facilities in: J Med Ethics. 0:1-3 Richmond, J., 2014. Refinement Alternatives: Minimizing Pain and Distress in Allen, D. and Waters M. ed. In Vivo Toxicity Testing” in: Reducing, Refining and Replacing the Use of Animals in Toxicity Testing. Cambridge: RSC. pp. 133

David Jentsch