Question: Do yo test on animals?If you do why do you test on animals?

Hannah Bolt answered on 16 Nov 2016:

Hi!

At the moment my research does not involve animal testing.

To check how toxic my drugs might be to humans we use other tests that allow us to avoid using mammals. Firstly, we take cell samples from human skin or liver cells and grow these. We can then test these cells outside of a living organism to see the effect of a drug on the cells (this is called ‘in vitro’ testing).

If the compounds are not too toxic to these cells, we then treat insects with the drug to see how many survive (at the moment all the insects survive). In particular we use an insect called ‘Galleria mellonella’ which is a moth larvae (see Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galleria_mellonella) Testing insects doesn’t currently have the same ethical considerations that testing animals does and these moth larvae have surprising similarities to the mammalian immune system.

Although I don’t do animal testing in my research, many pharmaceutical companies do. It is a very debated issue but at some point in drug discovery animal testing may be necessary. All animal testing is strictly controlled so scientists have to weigh up the suffering that testing may cause an animal with the possibility to develop a drug that can help thousands of patients.

Hannah