Health research charities hit back at animal rights campaign

pharmafile | June 21, 2011 | News story | Medical Communications Animal testing, Animal tests, Cancer Research UK, animal activists 

Four of the UK’s leading health research charities have hit back after being accused of funding “horrific animal experiments” by an animal rights lobbying group.

Animal Aid has launched a media campaign calling for a financial boycott of Cancer Research UK, the British Heart Foundation, Parkinson’s UK and the Alzheimer’s Society.

It is set to drive home its message with a series of newspaper adverts urging people to stop giving the charities money until “they pledge to end their funding of animal experiments”.

Calling animal-based research a “wasteful and futile quest”, it wants the public to instead support charities that “fund only non-animal research methods”, such as donated human tissue and organs, microdosing and computer modeling.

But Cancer Research UK said that not only are animal trials a legal requirement in the UK for any new drug, and not just cancer drugs, but that animal research has underpinned virtually all the advances made against cancer in the last 100 years.

It cites breast cancer drug tamoxifen – “arguably one of the most important cancer drugs of all time” – along with Novartis’ chronic myloid leukaemia drug Glivec (imatinib) as advances that would not have been discovered without animal testing.

“Animal research is a necessary means to an end: helping people with cancer to live longer lives,” said Dr David Scott, the charity’s director of science funding.

The charities insist that great strides have been made by using animals in research and that their use is governed by strict ethical and legal guidelines.

But Animal Aid director Andrew Tyler said the group “is under no illusions as to the pro-animal research lobby’s significant financial and political clout”.

“The British public do not like the idea of animals enduring great suffering to no purpose,” he concluded.

However, the British Heart Foundation pointed out that many of today’s common treatments could not have been developed without animal research and cites heart failure medicines, pacemakers and transplants as just a few examples.

“We need more research to develop new treatments and help people live longer happier lives,” the BHF said in a statement, adding: “And sometimes, we will need animal research to do this.”

Adam Hill

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