U.S. Regulator to Restrict Primate Testing for Drug Safety

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has announced plans to limit the use of monkeys in testing certain new drug treatments, marking a significant step in the Trump administration’s efforts to restrict animal use in scientific research.

Curbing Animal Experiments

The agency’s head, Marty Makary, issued a statement on Tuesday asserting that “modern science offers us far more effective and humane ways to assess the safety of medicines.”

He specifically suggested that some safety tests currently performed on primates for monoclonal antibodies before they are marketed could be eliminated or reduced. These tests, he believes, could be replaced by alternative techniques, notably computer modelling.

• Monoclonal antibodies are treatments custom-made for specific diseases, including cancers and conditions like Crohn’s disease.

Cost and Time Savings

Mr. Makary, who pledged in April to limit animal testing, insisted that such a change “could reduce the time needed to bring a drug to market and decrease research and development costs.”

Support from Experts and NGOs

The FDA’s announcement has been widely welcomed by animal welfare groups.

• Zaher Nahle from the NGO Center for a Humane Economy hailed it as an “important step,” telling AFP that researchers “can get results at least equivalent, if not better” for toxicological prediction “with other approaches.”

This sentiment was echoed by Deborah Fuller, Director of the Washington National Primate Research Center, which conducts medical experiments on primates. She declared to AFP that going without monkeys in this specific context “seems perfectly reasonable” to her.

A Call for Caution

However, Ms. Fuller also urged caution. She stressed that moving too quickly could be counterproductive, stating: “If we go too fast, we’re going to shoot ourselves in the foot, because as far as future treatments and biomedical advances are concerned, we still need animals.”

She noted that current alternative methods are not yet sufficient to replace the entirety of animal testing.

Various animals—mainly mice, but also, to a lesser extent, macaques and dogs—are used in research across fields like neuroscience and immunology, as well as for testing the efficacy and safety of vaccines and medicines.

Source: Defi Media