YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Alternatives to Animal Testing Are Finally Taking Off

103 points rbanffy 3 hours ago 16 comments

willmeyers 2 hours ago | parent

As slow as it may be to adopt, it's a welcome change to how people should do research. Why induce suffering on an animal when the potential for failure and or miscalculation is so high? It seems from the article a model/chip can be more insightful on how something will affect humans.

meowface 2 hours ago | parent

It should be a tiered system, IMO.

1) Where possible, don't test in animals.

2) When testing in animals, first ensure that there is reasonable confidence the risk and severity of harm from the testing will be minimal. Only begin initial in vivo testing after this has first been achieved.

3) For test animals that are or aren't harmed, allow them to live happy, (relatively) normal, natural lives. Don't end their life early unnecessarily, with exceptions for humane euthanasia if the testing has unexpectedly caused significant, persistent suffering. Treat them as a pet owner would treat their beloved pet rat.

Some may consider it extreme, but, in my view, in an ideal world, people would treat testing in animals almost like testing in humans. The researcher should first ask "would I feel comfortable testing this in a voluntary human test subject?" Non-human animals would still be the first line of testing, since harm/death in a rat/mouse/chimpanzee is less morally bad than in a human, but I think this should be the mindset.

sporedro 1 hour ago | parent

I agree. If it’s a question of just cost - (animals being cheaper to just test on quickly and faster) animal testing shouldn’t be allowed.

dguest 33 minutes ago | parent

I feel like "just a question of cost" is a heavy lifter here though.

Cost core to our resource allocation system, for better or worse, and if something costs a lot it usually means we can't do it as much. In this framing, cutting out animal testing would (often) mean medical research is slower. In this framing it's a question of where people are willing to put the dial on ethics vs results, and of course pumping the breaks in one place without universal buy-in just means the cruelty moves elsewhere.

I don't think the above 1-dimensional framing is the whole story though. You could imagine more standardized data sharing, so that the data that cost the lives of a few thousand rats could be used by others. And of course you could require (as drug trials do) that the study be registered before any experiment happened, and that the results be published regardless of the outcome. Some of these changes could actually make the science better, in addition to more ethical.

idbnstra 26 minutes ago | parent

hopefully animal testing alternatives keep innovating enough that they, like some renewable energy sources today, become cheaper to make use of than their incumbents

voidUpdate 20 minutes ago | parent

I do feel bad for medical mice, especially things like SCID Mice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_combined_immunodeficien..., which are basically only born to be infected with something, and then die. Even more so in a recent case of academic fraud I've seen involving cancer testing, where the data was obviously faked, but mice still died for the data.

But yes, it's hard to test immune responses without hurting a living animal, since you'd have to somehow have a non-alive immune system to test on otherwise

sandworm101 1 hour ago | parent

Funny animal research story: University had an animal research committee to which anyone wanting to "use" an animal on university property had to submit proposals. Theatre department wants to "borrow" a lamb from the school's agricultural department research herd. Female character was to hold a live lamb during several stage scenes. Three shows a week for about a month. Everyone laughed. Then came the objection:

As the lamb would be exposed to uncontrolled people/pathogens it could not be used for further scientific studies nor returned to the herd. There was doubt it could even be sold for food. So, absent anyone taking it home as a pet, its appearance on stage was more of a death sentence than any scientific study!

They opted for a doll.

persedes 1 hour ago | parent

Nice to see TissUse getting a shout out :)

  the FDA wanted data from organs-on-a-chip or some comparable alternative.
This is the main takeaway from the article imho and great news! ~15 years ago those systems were were not very interesting for pharma companies (bayer used to have a campus a few s-bahn stops away) due to regulators requiring animal tests over those systems.

Aboutplants 1 hour ago | parent

Ah lest we forget about Jevons Paradox. With the ability to discover a nearly infinite number of potential breakthroughs, we are going to need more animal testing than ever!

(Sarcasm but also some potential truth)

greenavocado 1 hour ago | parent

This was already figured out and built out years ago https://www.darpa.mil/research/programs/microphysiological-s...

moralestapia 53 minutes ago | parent

I believe that the issue is not that we are not capable of, it's just that we don't want to do it or give priority to it.

All the while people with massive power and resources are just wasting them on gimmicks and plots to keep increasing their net worth, power, all of that.

The one who don't care have all the power, the ones who care have none.

_doctor_love 1 hour ago | parent

“It’s people man! We’re the ones who are miserable, so why shouldn’t we get to try it all first?!”

- Sealab 2021

groceryheist 52 minutes ago | parent

In the next 18 months it will come out that Anthropic and/or OpenAI have killed ~1,000,000,000 mice to RL train models for drug discovery. May these model/chips be widely available and cheap enough soon!

tippa123 43 minutes ago | parent

What makes it more complicated is that regulatory authorities across different countries have varying views on what is considered 'acceptable'. As mentioned in the Harvard example from the article. This could mean that both animal and non animal testing will be required for the forceable future to satisfy both sets of views until there is sufficient alignment from the 'big' regulators imo.

Spacecosmonaut 16 minutes ago | parent

The dirty little secret of human organoid models is that they are grown in a matrix (e.g. Matrigel) that is derived from a tumor that secretes this matrix, which is grown in a mouse host. The mouse of course is "sacrificed" to harvest this matrix.

superkuh 11 minutes ago | parent

The massive increases of medical research spending to useful outcomes directly track the decrease in testing in humans and then animals. False positives from doing research in systems that are not the systems the medicine will be used in results in the observed waste and lack of progress compared to, say, the 1950s.

I am not saying we should not have stopped directly testing in humans or animals. But I am saying that the result has been worse outcomes. And any further shifts away from the biological systems that need the medicine (like using computational crap like LLMs) will further increase this disconnect.