From Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine:
WASHINGTON, D.C.—A group of scientists, physicians, ethicists, and advocates sent a letter this Wednesday to the newly confirmed director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Monica Bertagnolli, urging her to reduce the agency’s use of animals in medical research. Led by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine and co-signed by 246 individuals and 18 organizations, including biotechnology companies, think tanks, and animal protection groups, the letter requests that Dr. Bertagnolli prioritizes funding for developing, validating, and using nonanimal human disease models. It also requests divestment from animal use in research areas where poorly predicted human outcomes have been demonstrated, such as vaccine development and liver toxicity.
The NIH is the largest funder of biomedical research in the world, overseeing a budget of nearly $50 billion this fiscal year. Despite evidence that animal experiments are unreliable predictors of human physiology and disease states, they remain the presumed “gold standard” in basic and preclinical research by the NIH and others within the research community. This reliance on animals contributes to failures and wasteful spending in the drug development pipeline and puts clinical trial participants at risk by failing to capture unsafe or ineffective products. It also requires that untold numbers of dogs, cats, monkeys, mice, rats, and other animals be bred and used in painful and deadly procedures—estimated to be greater than 100 million per year in the U.S.
More here.