As executive director of Utah Animal Rights Coalition (UARC), it’s my mission to expose and help stop cruelty to animals, wherever it occurs. I applaud the recent closure of a facility in Virginia owned by Envigo which bred and sold thousands of beagles to laboratories around the world each year.
Federal investigators had documented more than 70 violations of the Animal Welfare Act at this disgraceful facility, including housing hundreds of beagles who were sickly, malnourished and living in filth, with wholly inadequate veterinary care.
While animal lovers in Utah can join me to celebrate and help find homes for 4,000 beagles liberated from this facility, it’s important to understand that this is much more than a supersized adoption story. We can all play a role here in our state to prevent the abuse and needless death of more animals for laboratory experiments.
Congress is considering a long-overdue change to the current drug development paradigm and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s over-reliance on animal tests. If passed into law, it would prevent animals from being in danger in the first place. And, if you follow the science, it’s clear that we can put human health first, as well.
UARC is joined by 170 animal welfare, pharmaceutical, patient and medical groups in supporting this change. One of these groups, Animal Wellness Action, is spearheading the effort to end the animal testing mandate with a bipartisan bill known as the FDA Modernization Act.
This legislation would lift a 1962 mandate for animal tests and allow scientists to use new and better testing strategies for drug and vaccine development, including modern methods that spare animals. Technology has changed a great deal since 1962, and it’s time for our laws and regulations to catch up.
Testing on animals fails to predict human reaction to drugs. Scientists have found that almost 95% of drugs that appear safe and effective in animals go on to fail or hurt people during human clinical trials due to adverse reactions not predicted by traditional animal tests.
Testing on animals is no longer just inhumane, it’s now grossly inferior to new and sophisticated human-based models. Technologies like organoids and organs-on-chips can replicate the function of human organs because they are made from human cells and bioengineered to carry out the natural functions of the organs they model.
As an example, researchers recently assessed the performance of organ chips that model the human liver, an important organ to understand as it is the primary site of metabolism for most drugs. Developed by biotech company Emulate, Inc., and referred to as Liver-Chips, the study evaluated the ability of the Liver-Chips to assess the toxicity of 22 known drugs, meaning drugs for which we already have extensive real-world patient data.
The study demonstrated that the Liver-Chip was able to correctly identify 87% of the tested drugs that caused drug-induced liver injury in patients. These were drugs that had already tested as safe in animal tests. The liver damage resulted in 208 patient fatalities and 10 liver transplants. Had these drugs been tested using the Liver-Chip, these human fatalities and injuries would likely have been avoided. Unfortunately, current law prohibits pharmaceutical companies from using this more reliable technology, and instead requires them to carry out archaic and outdated animal tests.
This is why the bipartisan FDA Modernization Act is needed. Fortunately, it is progressing toward enactment. It was in a larger package of FDA reforms and passed the full House 392-28. It was also included in the Senate version of the legislation and passed out of committee. Both chambers are now in negotiations to reconcile the language of the two packages, with a good chance of passing before years’ end.
All of us can help to advance this important bill if we speak up and tell our elected leaders to vote for the FDA Modernization Act. The voice of Utahns is especially important, as Sen. Mitt Romney sits on a powerful committee that can push this transformative legislative effort across the finish line.
Join me in urging Sen. Romney to step up and support this crucial bill that can remove the antiquated animal testing mandate so that we can deliver medicines cheaper and faster to patients while bringing us closer to the day that we never read another horror story about breeding mills that exist to sell animals to labs.
Jeremy Beckham, MPA, MPH, is the executive director of the Utah Animal Rights Coalition, a nonprofit organization dedicated to ending cruelty to animals in Utah, wherever it occurs.
from The Salt Lake Tribune https://ift.tt/mg6kbpd
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