It’s time to replace animal testing with a better alternative

Methuselah Foundation recently announced a $1 million competition to encourage innovation that will enable medicine to move away from unreliable animal testing.

The change is long overdue. In the U.S., all our food and drug research has been guided by the 1938 Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act, which requires that every drug be tested on animals. While this was state-of-the-art scientific process 84 years ago, we can do much better today.

The reason why is simple: Animal testing is unreliable, ineffective and costly.

Because many human diseases cannot be reproduced in animals, 90% of drugs found safe and effective in animal tests fail during human clinical trials. That results in a lot of lost research and development time and high costs as companies burn through money during years of human clinical trials. This is one reason why it’s not unusual to spend up to $5 billion to develop a new oncology drug. Or why it can take up to 15 years of work.

We can no longer afford to waste this much time and money. We need to make our therapy development process far more efficient.

That’s why we must find ways to make better use of bio printed human tissue to eliminate the harm to animals and humans, improve clinical accuracy and speed our ability to deliver the best patient outcomes.

Animal free precision medicines (AFPM) SIX-STAGE PROCESS

Bio printed human tissue offers real advantages. It can provide human-equivalent measurements that are required by the FDA for new drug trials. Because it uses bioengineered human tissue, it promises to be superior to animal testing for research, clinical trials and precision medicine because it can more accurately project lab test results onto human subjects.

To encourage the development of bio printed human tissue – often called organs on a chip – we have announced the Animal Free Precision Medicine Innovation Prize, a $1 million challenge to normalize the use of bioengineered tissue that mimics live human organs and develop the first “body-on-a-chip” solution that can be used to develop drugs. Winning entries must drive a 75% success rate for drug approvals, vs. the current 10% rate.

Dr. Anthony Atala, a leader in the field of organ printing and founding director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine at the Wake Forest School of Medicine, said the need is great for a superior alternative to animal testing.

"For many years, we at Wake Forest have been aware of the severe limitations of animal testing and how inadequate it is for personalized medicine,” he said. “I am excited to support this Animal Free Precision Medicine initiative and the incentives it creates to accelerate this new era of medical research." 

Join us to bring this dream to life.  Donate to Methuselah Foundation.