2 November 2021

by Marcia Triunfol

On August 31st, 2021, a group of five panelists at the 11th edition of the World Congress on Alternatives and Animal Use in the Life Sciences responded to the question: “Proof in animals: Has journal editorial policy fallen behind advances in human-based approaches?”

One of the panelists, Pep Pàmies, chief editor at Nature Biomedical Engineering, recalled Betteridge’s law of headlines, “any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” But as it turns out, the question raised here does not have a clear, one word answer, even though recent evidence from 90 scientists responding to our survey points towards a practice of ‘publication bias’ in which specialized journals request that animal data be provided to validate studies produced using human biology-based approaches, such as organoids and organ on a chip. According to many scientists, such requests cannot be justified and illustrate widespread resistance to full acceptance of non-animal methods. The fact that some editors and/or peer-reviewers continue to regard animal model data as the gold standard and in many cases make acceptance for publication conditional on providing “proof in animals” (which may involve performing new animal experiments), can become a barrier to scientific progress. [Read more…]

15 October 2021

The BioMed21 Collaboration recently contributed to several sessions within WC11—the 11th World Congress on Alternatives and Animal Use in the Life Sciences. This triennial event was postponed in summer 2020 and took place virtually between August 23 – September 2 this year. With more than 100 sessions, 30 exhibitors and sponsors, and 500 e-posters, it was as vibrant and busy as a real-life event!

Click on the links below to access our presentations associated with our ongoing projects and efforts around the globe: [Read more…]

16 September 2021

The European Parliament has adopted a resolution vote calling on the European Commission to establish an EU-wide Action Plan for the active phase out of the use of animals in experiments by defining milestones and targets to incentivise progress in the replacement of animals with non-animal  human-relevant methods. Nearly 10 million animals are used in invasive experiments in EU laboratories every year, including monkeys, dogs, cats, rabbits, rats and mice, a huge number of animals that has remained relatively unchanged in the last decade. The vote has been welcomed by animal welfare groups; Humane Society International called the vote “an historic opportunity to take animal suffering out of EU the equation and shift the focus to modern, cutting-edge, human relevant research.” 

Whilst acknowledging European-level initiatives to reduce and refine the use of animals, the Parliament recognised that an active, coordinated approach for the full replacement of animals has not been achieved. By requiring an EU-wide action plan with an ambitious timeline and list of milestones, the European Parliament is aiming to drive the active phase-out of animals used for all scientific purposes. [Read more…]

29 June 2021

In February 2013, Dr. H. Shaw Warren, then a sepsis researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital, was interviewed by Gina Kolata, a reporter at the New York Times about the difficulties his research group had encountered while attempting to publish a specific paper. What was the main objection raised by reviewers for various journals, including Science and Nature? The fact that the study demonstrated that mice were very poor models for mimicking human inflammatory diseases. As Dr. Warren commented, “They [the reviewers] were so used to doing mouse studies that they thought that was how you validate things.” [Read more…]