Failure
Animal research discussions often reference the statistic ‘90% of drugs tested on animals fail’ (or similar) to argue for or against animal research. However, the first point they miss is that failure is a major part of science, and in fact the thing which we learn the most from. Even if we were to replace all the animals in research tomorrow, we would still see a high failure rate, around 90%, or possibly higher as without the ethical or moral considerations of using animals in modern technologies, scientists may undertake previously reprehensible tests in alternatives to animals.
Consider searching for a rare book. On foot, you can explore every bookstore you come across and eventually find it in the tenth store you browse. Your failure rate is 90%. Using a modern technology, the internet, you can search for the book and find it almost immediately from that same store, but the search results will still have searched in the background on your behalf in the other nine stores. Your failure rate is still 90%, but modern technology has made the search significantly easier and cheaper to produce a positive result. In fact, you can extend your search to include your top ten list of rare books as you will have the resources, and now time, to do this more efficiently. But this is obvious oversimplification.
Removing animals from research will still involve failure, as does all of scientific discovery, and in fact, as does all of life. Ideas and hypotheses, even if tested using alternatives to animals, will still need to be validated in humans, in a living system through which the hypotheses have not previously been observed, and this in itself will mean that a significant number of drugs found safe and effective in non-animal methods of research will still fail in human trials. There will be costs in the failures which need to be justified to the funders, facilities, and public, just as they are now.
If we were to remove the trials in which medical discovery failed in the animal tests and focus on the trials which didn’t use animals, there is still an ~85% failure rate (compared to ~90% when including research which includes animal trials). This is because many trials fail in stages before the use of animals.
The FDA notes a number of reasons for denying a new drug application, including uncertain dose selection, inconsistent results, inadequate clinical effect, or poor efficacy. Some of these may be as a result of animal testing, but we cannot be sure and certainly cannot extrapolate.
The cost of developing new drugs is also often scrutinised and reported to be somewhere around $USD1-2billion, but would that reduce significantly if animals were removed? This figure is quite misleading as it refers to the process from start to finish, including: the funding of research by the government; research equipment, transportation, and storage costs; and the subsequent purchasing of the products from pharmaceutical companies by the government. Most of the costs are likely remain even if animals were removed. In fact, initially the costs may increase due to the implementation of infrastructure required to run alternatives.
In another corner of science, physics, there are immense costs to which there is some public opposition, but it is generally accepted that it is a worthwhile pursuit to better understand the universe and our place in it. The International Space Station cost around $USD150 billion; the Large Hadron Collider approximately $USD4.75 billion; and, the Juno spacecraft approximately $USD1 billion. Each of these is a single experiment, to which there are multiple parts and sub-experiments, and each of which give us, generally, only knowledge of curiousity. And each of which involved multiple failures to achieve and maintain.
But, without animals we are free to pursue science to its limits, without the ethical and moral implications of inflicting pain on others. Failing in nine out of ten of our tests is not a bad figure, and investing billions of dollars in medical interventions is a worthwhile expenditure. It is a success that we ultimately found a positive result and many ways in which not to find a positive result! But harming animals in the negative results is reprehensible and can be prevented. It is this prevention that should be pursued by scientists who are interested in finding answers. We could run thousands of tests without animal ethics committee approval, tweaking parameters finely each time to gauge the optimal limits. But ultimately this could potentially increase the ‘failure’ rate to above 99.9%. The difference being that no animals were harmed in the process, but science and human health still wins.
If we are to advocate against the failure rate and the cost of developing new drugs, we are going to run ourselves into a corner. If an investment is made in alternatives to animals in research and it does not reduce the failure rate or financial cost, animal advocates will be left with a lot of explaining to do. We must campaign to remove animals, but not against failure or the cost of our health.
A quick action:
There are a number of organisations and collectives which have the resources to engage with government decision makers to further the investment and implementation of alternatives to animal use in medical discovery and production. The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine in the US is a particularly effective advocate group. Modernisation in the US allows advocate groups in Australia to use these advances as encouragement for the Australia government not to fall behind the rest of the world, and reduces the cost of modern technologies which requires less investment by Australian laboratories to convert from animal research facilities. What changes in the US will have a huge impact on what can change in Australia.
