Do you believe that experimentation on animals for scientific purposes is justified. Are there any alternatives to animal experiments?

I highly believe that experimentation with animals for scientific purposes is justified because the generation of data is fundamental for the development of new medicines and vaccines.

Firstly

, before testing the new medicine or vaccine, it is a global standard established by many regulatory authorities that tests with animals should be conducted to understand the safety profile of the medicine, which are named pre-clinical tests.

For instance

, if a pharmaceutical industry requests approval for starting clinical research with human beings without these results, the regulatory agency would for sure refuse to approve it.

Secondly

, the information obtained from pre-clinical tests is important to identify the molecule behaviour within the complex physiological system,

this

is

also

called the "in vivo" experiment.

For example

, in the 1950s, it was found that a lot of babies were born without arms and legs due to the use of medicine for nausea during their intrauterine development. The dramatic outcome would be avoided if pre-clinical research with pregnant mice were conducted before launching it on the market for pregnant women to use. Despite existing alternatives to animal researches, which try to mimic

this

interaction using experiments called "in vitro", using human cells or human tissues that are exposed to different drug concentrations to assess its safety profiles, there is a significant risk to miss important interactions resulted from drug metabolic

that is

only possible to identify using complex physiological systems,

such

as mentioned in the case occurred with pregnant women. In conclusion, alternatives for animal experimentation should be continuously developed in order to decrease as much as possible the use of animals in preclinical studies.

However

, until new technologies and methods are developed, it is important to keep all efforts on the conduction of preclinical research with a focus on drug safety profile while keeping their wellbeing before, during, and after the experiments.