I guess they meant well...

I hate to tell cancer research advocates who are against animal research, but regulatory authorities in the US, UK, Japan - anywhere - will not approve even the most miraculous new cancer drug for people until there is minimal animal safety and efficacy testing.

"Sorry, we can't support a potential cure for you but we're happy to help you with end-of-life planning."

I don't think so.

Thanks for bringing this to my attention, Mike.

The sad thing is that PETA and the so-called Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (which is neither) have been playing this card for a decade or more.

They have a list of charities that have signed pledges not to fund animal research - most of these are pallative care organizations that would not ordinarly do so in any event.

PETA/PCRM also maintain a list of those health charities that do support animal-based research and have actually gotten a few U.S. corporations to withdraw support or to designate it be used for non-animal research only.

Some of America's best loved charities are on this latter list of those who support in-vivo research. St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, March of Dimes, The Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation, The Michael J. Fox Foundation, American Heart Association are just a few among nearly 100 who face targeting by animal rights militants.

Jacquie Calnan
Americans for Medical Progress

There certainly are options to support cancer research without supporting animal experiments, and the outcomes benefit both people and animals at the same time. Our charity, the Dr Hadwen Trust for Humane Research, funds innovative research into a range of diseases including cancer, by working with scientists to develop high-tech, non-animal solutions to replace animals in the research process. The outcome is not only more ethical, it can also result in research approaches that are more relevant to human patients than experimenting on other animals. Species differences are an undoubted problem in medical research, and that's certainly true in cancer research. So supporting research that replaces animals with alternatives is a win-win solution for all. We recently funded a very successful project that resulted in the development of the first ever 3-D non-animal model of breast cancer for example. You can find out more at our scienceroom site www.scienceroom.org

I can imagine that it is very popular from a donation perspective to have a group like the Hadwen Trust. But the bottom line will always be, what does the research produce? Diverting charitable funds from medical research organisations/charities to something like the Hadwen group simply limits options for scientists. The money going to the traditional organisations funds all kinds of research based upon the needs of the science (including non animal research). Funds going to groups like Hadwen ONLY funds non animal research, limiting the tools available. How could this possibly be desirable from a public perspective?
It seems to me that the vital point (from a public perspective - for people like myself) is for potential donors to learn about science. Anyone who truly understands science and who therefore understands the need for multiple scientific tools, will choose to give the option to the scientist.

Well said Janis, as it happens Cancer Research UK make their position clear in the following policy briefing

http://info.cancerresearchuk.org/publicpolicy/Ourpolicypositions/resear…

If you look through Cancer Research UK's most recent scientific yearbook you get some idea of the breadth of research they support, and how animal research plays a key role in the mix.

http://www.cancerresearch.org.uk/aboutus/whoweare/ourreportsandaccounts…

Clearly it is possible to study some aspects of cancer without working with animals, and indeed most cancer researchers go their whole careers without ever having to personally do any animal research. Animal (and bacteria, yeast, slime mold etc.) research is crucial to many areas, especially in research aimed at understanding the basic biology of cancer and exploring new treatment strategies, so the vast majority of such scientists realise the debt they owe to their colleagues who do work with animals (most of whom use non-animal methods alongside their animal work). While new non-animal methods are being developed, usually on their own merits rather than by anti-vivisectionists, with 3D tissue models being a prime example, they can't replace all animal models of cancer, and of course there are also new animal methods constantly under development such as transgenic technologies mentioned in the CRUK report above that the cancer research community is finding very useful indeed.

To be honest if somebody is that bothered by animal research that they don't want to give to any charity where there's a chance that their donation will go to fund it then perhaps it's no bad thing that their donation goes to a hospice or palliative care charity, such charities are always in need of donations.

The only reason animal research has played a part in medical advances for cancer is that it is mandated by law that things be tested on nonhuman animals before reaching humans. As a result, many harmful things made it to the human market right quick and many things that likely could have helped humans never made it.

One can not only support care, but can support research for cancer without supporting animal experimentation. Looking up humane charities is simple. Many have been mentioned here.

If we really want a cure for cancer, we all need to stop sending our money to places that do animal research and begin opposing the majority of our research tax dollars going to it. Demand prevention, epidemiology, cell culture, organ culture, autopsy, and stem cell research. Nonhuman animals are not good predictors of human diseases and reactions, period.

To those pulling the PETA/PCRM card, why not check out what these Doctors have to say: www.curedisease.com

There are doctors and scientists around the world who realize the dilemmas of nonhuman animal experimentation. When are you going to do the same?

From AR: "Nonhuman animals are not good predictors of human diseases and reactions, period."

Until you defend that statement with some evidence, I see little reason to take your post seriously. And no, anecdotes are not evidence.

I have a sinking feeling you are well within the clutches of crankery AR. I just took a look at your blog, hearing you spout of nonsense like antibiotics were shown ineffective in animals and tylenol shown to be lethal.

Sam, I did provide a source. I guess you had already closed off your mind to the information though, automatically dismissing me as an AR crank.

You may want to open your head back up and let some info in because here it comes again- from a non-AR org mind you-

www.curedisease.com
Specifically, you can check this article out: http://www.peh-med.com/content/4/1/2

Perhaps you will read it this time.
If you are interested in further reading, check out "Brute Science- Dilemmas of Animal Experimentation" (Lafolette) or "Sacred Cows and Golden Geese: The Human Cost of Experiments on Animals" (Greek & Greek)

My "nonsense" about antibiotics is actually truth, friend. The first animal studies on penicillin showed it to be ineffective. If we relied only on animals studies, not only would acetominophen (tylenol) have failed to make it to the market, but aspirin and ibuprofen (advil) would have failed to make it as well among many other helpful medications used by humans today.

But again, you may want to dismiss what I type as AR craziness. So, I invite you to do some of your own research. Hopefully you will.

Ta ta now.

The University of Minnesota just announced a join venture with the Veterinarian School and the Cancer Center.They hope to make it a model program. http://www.cvm.umn.edu/newsandevents/ACCR/index.htm

They are curing dogs of brain cancer and taking those learnings to develop a vaccine for human brain tumors. A dog's brain is much closer than a mice model and they hope to expand the program.

It is a win/win as pet owners willingly bring their pets for experimental treatment for which there are scant alternatives and investigators have more realistic data for which to analyze.

Thoughts?

AR, thatn "curedisease" website is run by a group calling itself the "Safer Medicines Campaign", who recently changed their name from "Europeans for Medical Progress", who are and have always been an anti-viv group despite what their their name suggests. They are essentially the European equivalent to PCRM and just as good at using misrepresentation and omission to advance their cause.

As for penicillin all the misrepresentation in the world cannot hide the fact that it was the animal studies undertaken by Howard Florey and colleagues that paved the way for its subsequent successful use in humans. Penicillin didn't prove "ineffective" in the first animal studies, Fleming just thought that it was metabolised too quickly and as a consequence never tested it's ability to cure infection by injection in animals. If he had it is possible that penicillin would have become available several years earlier, though to be fair to him difficulties with producing and purifying enough of the antibiotic would probably have delayed it's introduction for some time anyway.

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1945/press.html
http://www.path.ox.ac.uk/about/Penicillin

To say that animal tests would have stopped aspirin being approved is a total exaggeration, though perhaps they would have helped to cultivate a more cautious approach to a drug that is involved in almost a fifth of admissions to hospital for adverse drug reactions

http://speakingofresearch.com/extremism-undone/bad-science/#4

Those of us who are involved in medical research know that no technique is perfect, even phase III clinical trials sometimes give results that are later shown to be misleading. In many studies shortcomings (recognised or not) in the design of the study and/or mistakes made when interpretating the experimental data are to blame rather than any fundamental problen with the tissues, animals or human patients used in the study.

What anti-vivisectionists do is to focus on the failures of animal research in a nit-picking way that any of us who follow the antics of the anti-vaccination or HIV/AIDS denialist movements are very familiar with, while ignoring or dismissing all the evidence that animal research has been and is crucial to many areas of medical research.

@AR

"If we relied only on animal studies..."

But we don't do that. We use them to answer SOME questions and answer others in other systems. And that's the dilemma with your argument. You can point at a half-dozen or a dozen questions that can't be answered in animal systems, that is solely an argument against answering THESE questions in an animal system and not indicative at all for the GENERAL utility of animal systems in testing. Nobody denies there are differences between any given other species and humans. There are even differences from one human to the next. The only stringent conclusion from this line of argumentation is we don't test drugs at all. That can hardly be the answer, can it?

The real answer is restricting animal research to those questions it can answer and where no sound alternative exists, and conducting it in a fashion that poses no unnecessary burden for the animals.

Hi Maeve, you'll probably see a lot more such programs in the near future there is increasing awareness of how important it is to integrate human and veterinary research. Indeed through the "One Health Initiative" that was established a couple of years ago most of the key players in human and veterinary research are seeking to do just that.

http://www.onehealthinitiative.com/index.php

I'll also take the opportunity to recomment Dr. Michael Festing's excellent debunking of Ray Greek's book "Sacred cows..." at http://www.worldcongress.net/2002/proceedings/PCP%20Festing.pdf

It gives a flavour of what is coing on in the book.

Janis, it's really lamentable that this debate so quickly deteriorates when there really is no need. The scientists who apply to the Dr Hadwen Trust for research grants do so not because they are anti-vivisectionists, but because they are often very frustrated by the lack of progress being made in their research area using the traditional animal model and they want to find a better way to conduct their research that is more relevant to human patients and likely to produce more useful results. That's not closing off options for researchers, quite the opposite. The research we fund is at the cutting-edge of medical science, finding new and better ways of answering old problems. It's not an issue of funding research that just happens to not involve animals; replacement research is about pro-actively developing a totally new research tool that better represents the disease of study and translates better to human patients so that unsatisfactory animal models can be replaced. One of the big problems with this type of research is that many of the big funding organisations are simply not prepared to seed-fund new ideas in their infancy but that's precisely where much medical research needs the support. The reason why the Dr Hadwen Trust's research portfolio has been so successful, is that we are prepared to fund those early techniques. For example, decades ago we were one of the very first charities to fund research into replacing eye irritancy tests and our early work laid the foundation for what has now become a replacement for the Draize eye test. The scientists we work with come to us with an open mind, something we could all learn from I think.

It seems many of my points are being ignored. Who is nitpicking. I suggest the books instead since there is a prejudice against antivivisectionists here. I understand. After all, we put your profits in danger.

To Paul, you are honestly asking me to believe the guy (you) belonging to an org (Pro-Test) that specifically states that "The jury is still out" on so many meds that have killed and sickened humans due to faulty testing? Sure.

To everyone else, there is no way to defend animal research both scientifically and ethically at the same time. For if the animals are enough like us biologically that many claim (albeit falsely) then they are enough like us to warrant the right not to be tested upon. But, if they are not enough like us to warrant the right not to be tested upon, then the extrapolation of their data to humans is flawed.

Sure, you learn about animals in the research. We have great treatments for SIV in monkeys and cancer in mice, but how long do humans and other animals have to suffer until animal researchers wake up and take a pay cut in order to look into more humane and more accurate alternatives (yet another point that has been ignored on this thread).

I am guessing the animal research supporters here are not stupid. I am guessing you are educated. I am guessing you understand biology and evolutionary theory. If that is the case, you have no excuse for defending animal research in that there are far better ways to study things that will extrapolate to humans with far better chances of being correct (ie many alternatives have an 80% chance of being correct while animal research tends to extrapolate 5-50% of the time). Coin flipping would be more accurate (and less expensive) than animal research.

Please give the money to research that has the patients in mind first- research on humans and parts of humans.

Thanks, Mike, for discussing this on your blog - and to you and Paul for your generous donations to Mrs Gee's fund-raising. Much of one's perspective is framed by one's personal experiences, and I don't think I am saying too much, or presuming on Mrs Gee's motivations, to say that what spurred her on was the fact that her own mother died of ovarian cancer while in her twenties, and her father died of kidney cancer in his mid sixties. For both of them, I expect that the palliative care they received was as good as could have been expected - but more preferable by far would have beeen tools to diagnose, treat and, if possible, cure the diseases before they got to that point.

Wendy you say that "The scientists we work with come to us with an open mind, something we could all learn from I think. "

Yet from your website I learn that you're not quite so open minded.

"Research fellows, research assistants technicians or students whose salary or maintenance grant is paid by the Dr Hadwen Trust must not be involved in any way with animal experiments; or with studies of animal cells, animal tissues or animal cell lines; or with human fetal cells or tissues or human fetal cell lines, for the duration of the grant."

Seriously while the kind of research you fund is useful it's also funded by a lot of other organizations out there, from charities to companies (for examples see doi:10.1016/j.cell.2007.08.006 ), it's just that they don't tend to highlight the 3R's aspects so much but concentrate on the scientific usefulness of the technique. This is by the way why one should be careful about statistics for funding of "alternatives", they tend to greatly under-represent what is actually being done.

I also find it rather amusing that your website's biography of Dr. Hadwen makes no mention of the decades he spent campaigning against germ theory and vaccination...something of an embarrasment perhaps?

As to AR "but how long do humans and other animals have to suffer until animal researchers wake up and take a pay cut in order to look into more humane and more accurate alternatives (yet another point that has been ignored on this thread)"

Oh come on! Do you really have any evidence to back this up? In my experience it's programmers and engineers who collect the largest paychecks, biologists (animal or not) don't tend to do quite so well.

Research on SIV in monkeys may not have lead to a vaccine for HIV yet (or for that matter any really effective vaccine that would protect against multiple strains of SIV) but it has tought us a lot about both SIV and HIV that has helped to improve treatments and develop preventative measures such as PrEP, and will help even more in the future. We're certainly a lot closer to understanding what a HIV vaccine will need to do now than we were, progress is being made even if scientists have tended to be overly optimistic in the past. The same applies to cancer research, the unwarrented hype that sometimes greets publication of experiments with mice (e.g a recent vitamin C paper in PNAS) should not blind us to how useful animal research has been in the development of drugs such as angiogenesis inhibitors.

Your statistics on how predictive in vitro tests are compared to animal tests are also very suspect, the ability of animal tests to predict toxicity is often a lot better (e.g. Olsen et al 2000, doi:10.1006/rtph.2000.1399) and while in vitro tests are as if not more reliable than animal tests in some areas they usually have too narrow a fucus to be able to replace animal tests completely.

And drop the stupid "flipping a coin" argument, since when has the chance of any particular human toxicity occuring been 50%?

But this is all about safety testing, an area where I expect most animal testing to have been replaced by non-animal methods within the next decade or two, most animal research is done for basic research and early development of new treatments, areas where it will be much more difficult to replace.

What's the moral good of doing cancer research excluding the test on animals part, if anything that you find will have to be tested on animals anyway by someone else? Unless of course you can go straight through to testing on people you don't like, such as convicted criminals or the population of Africa or India.

And anyway, if I am going to cycle to East Kilbride (just five miles, but really steep uphill) to raise money for a new statue of Adolf Hitler, that's my choice and you can either sponsor my effort or not. Don't ask me about sponsoring a mural of Stalin instead. That is nothing to do with me. I'm doing this one for the Fuhrer. Now if -everyone- says they'd rather have a nice wall painting of "Uncle Joe", I have to reconsider. Maybe take the bus instead.

Generally anyway I feel about sponsorship that if I didn't want to donate money to the Margarine Preservation Society in the first place, and if I do not particularly care whether you eat a hundred boiled eggs this afternoon or not, then tying the two events together doesn't make a more attractive package. You know, that's how the sub prime mortgage crisis got started.

I almost hesitate to get into this conversation just because AR is clearly not going to be swayed no matter what anyone here says. However, for those who still possess and open mind I'll make a few comments. In vitro, computer modeling and the likes are all great methods of reducing the number of animals needed in research but can't replace them en mass. I for one am not quite ready to trust my new heart medication to the computer programming capability of some twenty-something college graduate with no vested interest in whether it works or not.

Lost in many of these discussions is often the benefit animal research has had for animals. Cures for rabies, Distemper, Mastitis, heart worm, protection against fleas and ticks, vaccines for cattle and your pets all have benefited from animal research. There is research being conducted to determine optimal feed compositions for dairy cattle.

The idea of using cell cultures as an alternative has very little validity anyway. The primary problem being, where do you think the animal cells come from in the first place? Cells don't last forever which means you have to have a supply of animals from which to obtain them for research.

Finally, in my experience those working in research with animals tend to show more compassion for the animals than those fighting for their rights. PETA kills nearly 80% of the animals they "rescue". Animal researchers in general have a very high regard for the health and welfare of their animals because good results depend on healthy and well cared for animals.