Development of medicines

The development of all new prescription medicines requires animal testing.

The development of a new medicine is a long, careful process lasting about 12 years.

All new prescription medicines are developed with the help of information from animal studies. It is currently impossible to develop a new prescription medicine without research in animals. To do otherwise would endanger human life and, at the same time, greatly limit medical progress. Mainstream medical and scientific opinion around the world accepts that animal research continues to be necessary.

Our understanding of the body has increased enormously in just a few generations. So it is easy to forget how much of our biology is still a mystery. Work in the past twenty years in molecular biology has revolutionised parts of the research process, allowing a greater portion of the research process to be done using computer and test tube methods. Non-animal methods are used wherever they can provide the required information. Once these methods have been used to the full, there is still more that needs to be known before tests in people can begin.

Animals are needed to examine those possible effects of medicines that cannot yet be predicted using other methods. These are effects that occur in the whole body - with its many different types of cells chemicals, communications signals, organs and systems all working together - rather than just focusing on direct effects of a medicine on specific cells or tissue.

In the body, a medicine is exposed to a vast array of conditions that we do not fully understand and therefore, despite being technologically advanced, are unable to reproduce outside the living body. Blood pressure, for instance, is controlled and affected by a variety of different body systems, of which our basic biological knowledge is still limited.

Ultimately, all medicines are studied in people, but only once scientists and doctors believe they have a good chance of being effective and they have enough understanding of the compound to conduct human tests safely. Without this information, human tests would be dangerous and unethical and governments would not grant permission for them to be conducted.

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