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-   -   Should animals be subjected to medical tests and experiments? (https://www.pokecommunity.com/showthread.php?t=385149)

Desinishon December 10th, 2016 7:04 AM

Should animals be subjected to medical tests and experiments?
 
Like title state...What are your thoughts about it? C:

Acc to me if only option is between an animal and human.
In most cases tissue culture and simulations do the trick but when it's still useful to test on animals in case there is some effect that cannot be seen when observed with tissue alone.
What do you guys think?

Desert Stream~ December 10th, 2016 8:00 AM

I think not! Animals grow and develop differently, and there are many diseases that affect only animals/only humans, leading to rather inaccurate test results at times. And most of those animals get put down or die because of testing :(

Nihilego December 10th, 2016 12:21 PM

Ahaha, the essays I could write on this. I've done my fair share of animal research first-hand so this is a really important topic to me. I did an AMA in this section a while back and got asked about animal research, so I'll just quote my response here. If anyone has nothing better to do reads this and has questions, I'd love to hear them and answer them here. 8)

Quote:

I guess the most important thing in my mind which I'd like to communicate is why animals are so neccessary for all of us. When you want to publish a bit of research (particularly if it's medical research), one of the critical questions is "does your idea actually work in living creatures?". If you've come up with a pathway which you think is dysregulated in a disease or if you've come up with a drug which you think could cure a disease, but you've only been able to show these things in vitro (in the lab - dishes of cells, reaction tubes, etc), you've got a huge problem. It's not at all uncommon that in vitro something works but when you put it in vivo (in a living animal) it doesn't work for some reason - this could be due to the idea itself being wrong in live animals or due to unknown / unexpected factors in the animals interfering with the idea, among other possibilities. Particularly given that we're publishing work here which we hope to one day translate to human health, we absolutely must be able to show that what we're doing has a role in a living animal. The medical research community cannot work off of "findings" and "treatments" which only apply to cells in plates in incubators. If we're going to build on a finding, we have to know that this finding is relevant to a living creature, and it's the medical community's duty make sure that ideas for application in humans which have not been tested in vivo don't make it into disease-focussed journals.

Unfortunately, this does sometimes turn into a case of "we want to publish, so let's do things with animals until something happens and work backwards from there" which is a really bad mindset and one that I absolutely hate - animals should only be used when there is serious in vitro evidence to back the use up. This causes problems sometimes as I said before for some people who have done years of in vitro work only to find that when they go in vivo, nothing happens - but that's more often than not due to something which has been overlooked or which isn't properly explored yet and which, in the hands of the right researchers, could easily open up new routes of investigation. All in vivo data, including negative results, is extremely valuable and the animals which provide it are taken much more seriously than walking bags of cells. When an animal is sacrificed (and yes, that's legitimately term for it) at the end of an experiment, absolutely everything possible is collected from it - not just the tissues in question but all of the tissues, its weight, the weight of the tissues, the animal's fat distribution, tumours and other unexpected tissue structures, anything and everything which could be used later to provide data and to avoid having to re-do the experiments in further animals. Things like the animal's behaviour, sleeping, metabolic and mating habits may have been noted too if the animal is being used for any related studies. These are really goldmines of information and they aren't used lightly by good investigators.

So the next question which I guess arises is what can be done to reduce the use of animals or to substitute them for something else altogether. I hear a lot of people who suggest using tissues taken from animals (the advantage here being that a single animal can provide many tissues) or donated from human patients to emulate the real thing and to an extent, it's a good idea which lots of people make use of. We, for example, can use slices of bone from donor paitents on which we culture cells to test the impact that a particular treatment or condition has on the ability of cells to degrade that bone. These sorts of things are called ex vivo (i.e., "out of the living") techniques and they're extremely useful to test basic hypotheses in more complex systems that dishes of cells. Artificial tissues and organs are also becoming popular too - although there is scepticism around how "realistic" they are and they don't truly satisfy the idea of an ex vivo experiment. However, neither of these systems alone is enough to draw meaningful conclusions from; as I said before, they can test basic hypotheses (and, if the hypothesis is incorrect then they can postpone or fully prevent progression to in vivo experiments), but if the results from these experiments are positive then the experiment will still have to progress to in vivo. There's only so much that a single tissue can tell you, even if that tissue is your tissue of interest, and when you need to know what your condition does beyond a single tissue then you need an animal to do that in. You could ask, "why not use more tissues?", but it's extremely difficult (if not impossible) to properly mimic the communication between these tissues ex vivo without adding even more tissues to the equation, and eventually you just end up asking the question "why not just use an animal?".

Another important use is genetically modified animals. We can use animals to study the function of genes by methods such as disabling or overactivating that gene in animals - either systemwide or in specific tissues under certain conditions. This is possible (and far easier) in cells, too, but these methods do not give a systemwide overview of the gene's effects. For example, we could have some gene which we hypothesise inhibits the division of bone-forming cells (osteoblasts) in mice. We knock this gene out in mice and find that, yes, their osteoblasts divide more - but we might also see, for example, that mice which have lost this gene spontaneously develop lung cancer (or whatever). This tells us that this division-regulating gene which we thought functioned in bone may also have a role in the lung and, further to that, may be important for preventing cancer in the lung. This is a real wealth of information which we could never have obtained from a homogenous population of cells in culture, and it's not at all uncommon to see unexpected consequences such as this from modifying animal genetics.

The last thing worth touching on would probably be in silico modelling - using computers to predict what would happen in animals instead of using the actual, real thing. However, most scientists agree that we do not currently have the knowledge to reliably predict large-scale biological processes on computers. While a few specific pathways or processes have been successfully emulated by computers, and while computers are great for target prediction (see later), we would need a comprehensive understanding of every single interaction going on between every single molecule in mammals to have a true in silico model of a living animal, at which point we'd be pretty much done with cell biology anyway, haha. So although the theory is nice and although some fairly basic things are possible already in silico, the in vivo models are still needed to verify these results and we're a long way off being able to faithfully extend in silico results to humans. Computers are, however, extremely useful right now for predicting interactions - for example, guessing where protein might bind DNA based on the DNA's sequence and the protein's structure, or how two nucleic acids could interact. These are applications definitely useful, but we can't scale them up to entire animals or draw sound conclusions with regards to the functional consequences of these interactions yet.

This reply probably raises some more questions, so please do ask away.
tl;dr, though, yes. Animals are absolutely necessary in medical research and tell us an incredible amount that other models cannot.

Quote:

Originally Posted by CUTIEFLY!!! (Post 9514075)
I think not! Animals grow and develop differently, and there are many diseases that affect only animals/only humans, leading to rather inaccurate test results at times. And most of those animals get put down or die because of testing :(

You'd be surprised - mice (for example) and humans have extremely high genetic similarity and almost all of their organs and tissues are laid out just like ours. Certainly, the differences that exist between us only rarely lead to "innacurate results", and most researchers go out of their way to validate their animal findings in human cells. Genetically, the coding parts of our DNA (i.e. the parts that make proteins, which are what make everything else happen) are on average 85% similar in mice and humans and are functionally almost identical. There's a short and quite nice (although pretty outdated) explination of human and mouse genetic similarity here. A lot of the time, mice are actually overkill and we can use even lower organisms like fruit flies and zebrafish, or even yeast. Although animals and humans can get different diseases, it's often possible to "copy" human diseases into animals, and in these cases the diseases are usually reproduced very well.

For the "animals being put down" argument, yes, it's true that many research animals die (although this is often not a direct result of the tests conducted on them) - but the number of animals which are used each year in research is infantesimally small compared to other ways in which animals are used, such as in the food industry. In 2013 in the UK, 4.02m animals were used for research while ~1bn animals are used as food. I'm pretty sure the latter of those two sources I've linked is biased, though, so take it with a pinch of salt; it was surprisingly hard to find this number from a website that isn't made by animal rights activists, haha.

Somewhere_ December 10th, 2016 2:16 PM

If we are fine with consuming animals, we should be fine with them being tested on. Stay consistent.

Desinishon December 10th, 2016 9:18 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Razor Leaf (Post 9514295)
Be awed by my prowess

If i can give 100 likes to that post c: Thats really informative post and i didn't find such views in any of other articles or sites about this question i came across.

My question is...what if we have enough amount of tissue we require in a ex-vivo method? Do we still need animal for further research?

Nah December 12th, 2016 10:33 AM

One other thing in regards to use of animals is that it's way more convenient to use them than people for various reasons.

Nihilego December 15th, 2016 9:21 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lelouch (Post 9514752)
If i can give 100 likes to that post c: Thats really informative post and i didn't find such views in any of other articles or sites about this question i came across.

My question is...what if we have enough amount of tissue we require in a ex-vivo method? Do we still need animal for further research?

Well, it's less about the amount of tissue that we've got and more about the actual identity of the tissue and how like the real thing it is. Some tissues are better-suited than others to work on, depending on a lot of things like how they interact with other tissues (i.e. if it's biologically valid to consider the issue alone) and if it's actually sustainable ex vivo. The species matters too - human tissue is much more valuable and reliable than mouse tissue, for example. So it's kinda situational. I'm of the belief that ex vivo methods can partially compensate for in vivo ones, but not completely (and I don't believe that they will for a very long time to come yet).

Tissue usage ex vivo is quite nice for testing principals and uncovering mechanisms etc. but if you want to take your findings in these systems into clinical development, you still 100% need animals; no matter how well-suited to ex vivo methodologies a tissue is, it still never properly mimics a real animal. By law, in fact (at least in the UK), a drug has to be tested on at least two mammalian species before it ever touches humans; so the animal is still kinda unavoidable if you're looking at serious therapeutics.


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