- Today we're talking about animal testing.
No, not that kind.
This kind.
(Myles coos) Oh, no.
Personally, animal testing feels icky.
Rabbits trapped in cages, dogs in pain, all those mice.
But animal testing is pretty common.
We don't know exact numbers, and I'll explain why later, but as many as 100 million animals are used for research each year, just in the United States.
So today we're asking, why do we still test on animals so much?
(radio hisses) That ibuprofen you take, those bleach wipes, even table salt, all, in some way, tested on animals.
Animal testing really took off in the 1930s after 17 women were blinded and one died from using a mascara.
After that, the Federal Drug Administration, the FDA, the government's agency that's responsible for making sure that our food and drugs are safe, started regulating cosmetics, and that's when cosmetic companies went hog-wild with animal testing.
To see if their products were safe, they started using tests like the Draize test, where they restrain animals and put products in their eyes.
Back then, they did this without anesthesia.
So it was so painful, many of them broke their necks trying to escape.
Well, turns out lots of people didn't think that that was cool.
Animal rights groups exposed these horrors to the public and people all around the world started to demand an end to this inhumane treatment of animals.
And in 1959, two British scientists wrote guidelines to improve the care of laboratory animals.
These guidelines included the three Rs, replace, as in don't use animals if there are good alternatives, reduce the number of animals used by improving techniques and sharing data, and finally, refine the treatment of animals, like by minimizing pain and improving medical care.
Now these three Rs are still the standard for animal testing, though they're just suggestions, not laws.
The amount of animals used in cosmetics testing has been reduced significantly.
In fact, due to public pressure, today it's banned in many places around the world, including Mexico, the EU, and eight US states.
However, animal testing is still huge in other areas, like medical, food, and poison research.
In fact, since 1962, the FDA has required animal testing for certain kinds of research.
So are there any laws about how these animals have to be treated in research?
Well, kind of.
In 1966, Congress passed the Animal Welfare Act, the AWA, and by the way, Britain did this like 100 years earlier.
But anyway, to this day, it's the only federal law that regulates the treatment of animals used in testing and research.
But guess what, y'all.
95 to 99% of lab animals aren't even covered by the AWA.
That's because, in 2002, Congress changed the definition of animal in this law to exclude most mice, rats, birds, and fish, and those are the most common lab animals.
So, at most, 5% of animals in labs are protected by this law.
The good news is that we do have new alternatives to replace animal tests.
Some of the most powerful are organs on chips.
No, not like that.
Like this.
Scientists take human cells and grow them on little plastic chips to form tiny manmade organs.
We've got kidneys on chips, intestines on chips, lungs on chips, even vaginas on chips.
Basically it's living human tissue with air and blood flow, so the chips can mimic things like breathing and muscle contractions.
This is huge, people.
Like, you can understand how human lungs respond to a new drug without causing any pain to animals.
I talked to this guy about them, and he founded and directs the Wyss Institute at Harvard, where they've been working on these chips for 10 years now.
One thing they're great for is testing the safety of drugs.
- The excitement about these organ chips is really that they're human, and the problem with animal testing is, one, obviously we don't wanna lose animals and kill animals or hurt animals.
But the reality is that a mouse is not a man, and so the results that are obtained with drug testing in animals are more often wrong than right.
- About 86% of drugs that pass animal tests fail in tests with humans.
Then there's all the drugs that are toxic in animals that might work great in humans, but we never get to try them.
I mean, how much chocolate would it take to kill you?
From personal experience, I can say it's definitely more than five bars.
But that much chocolate could be the end of Sir Barks-a-Lot.
By the way, please do not give chocolate to your dogs.
Please.
Ingber and his team recently showed that you can get better results on drug safety tests using livers on chips than using animals.
They tested 27 different liver drugs and their results will seven to eight times more accurate.
Now this method can't replace all animal research, at least not yet.
Ingber says that animal studies for stuff like understanding how the brain works, which is super complicated and involves billions of neurons, will take the longest to replace.
Another alternative to animal testing is to use computers, you know, creating algorithms that analyze tons of data we already have on chemicals.
For instance, recent research shows computer models of human heart cells can predict when drugs will have bad side effects better than animal testing.
Testing these drugs on animals is only about 75 to 85% accurate.
But with computer models, it's like 89 to 96%.
People are even working on 3D simulations of the whole heart to study cardiac diseases and drugs on a larger scale.
Eventually scientists want to develop virtual human bodies, which would revolutionize modern medicine and research.
Now, this is all a long ways off, though.
Modeling just one heartbeat takes about three hours on a super computer with almost 1,000 processors.
Researchers are excited about all these alternatives for two big reasons.
Animal testing is expensive and it's just not very accurate.
Plus, there's all kinds of new fancy personalized medicine and therapies now that are so specific to human biology that animal studies don't work at all.
Still, even when these alternatives give better results, animal tests are almost always used.
So what's the hold-up?
- Biggest challenge is always people.
It's convincing the people that work in pharmaceutical industry to change the way they do things, and that's hard for people to take a risk.
- Maybe someone should develop a drug to help humans embrace change?
Naw, but then you'd have to animal test on that, too.
Hmm.
Well, speaking of animals, sloths.
Institutions like the FDA, the National Institutes of Health, NIH, and publishers of academic papers are a lot like these cute little guys, especially when it comes to change.
So when it's time to approve something for testing, fund some research, or publish some study, they usually wanna see animal tests, even when it's not required.
- Publications, to this day, often want you to repeat it in a mouse model to show that it's meaningful, when mouse is even worse than rat and dog, in terms of predicting human.
There is this reflex of, this is the way we've always done it.
- The NIH has a similar reaction when it comes to giving out money for research.
They tend to fund animal studies.
- When you submit a grant, it's reviewed by experts in that field, and most of these experts in that field have never worked with something like this.
They all worked with animals.
So it's very hard, sometimes, to get funding to explore these sorts of new technologies, but NIH has a division that's explicitly exploring new technologies, and they have been very supportive of organ on chips.
- Then there's the FDA.
You know, the place that says it's A-okay for you to drink that neon-yellow Mountain Dew?
Their requirements are very confusing, definitely to me, and even to experts, because what people at the FDA say is that they're open to alternatives, but their regulations say the opposite, and you know the government.
One something's on paper, well, best of luck to changing it.
These rules are so old they don't even talk about computers, so technically those computational methods aren't even options.
But Congress is showing support for these alternatives to animal testing.
There's a bill that both Democrats and Republicans support.
Huh, imagine that.
It's called the FDA Modernization Act.
It's making its way very slowly through the House of Representatives right now.
It would, in theory, give drug-makers an option to use alternative methods.
A lot of these changes are motivated by public pressure.
I mean that's the reason why animal testing in cosmetics is banned in so many places, and this isn't any different.
- It goes in fits and starts.
There's resistance, there's resistance, somebody makes a major demonstration of, this new way is better, and then everybody shifts in that new direction.
Someday, will we replace animals completely?
Probably.
Is that after my lifetime?
Possibly.
But I think anything's possible.
- The fact is that, in 2022, in some instances, animal testing just isn't the most effective or efficient method.
And sure, we can't replace every animal test yet, even if all the old institutions gave a big old hug to change.
But we can definitely do better.
So what do you think?
Would you be cool with your parent or guardian taking a new medication that's only been tested on organs on chips or computer models?
