Ethics of Research involving animals
The use of animals for research in the pharmaceutical industry
Introduction
8.1 The pharmaceutical industry conducts or supports approximately one third of the animal research that is undertaken in the UK. Some of this is basic research that seeks to examine normal biological processes and the nature of disease (see also Chapters 5 and 6). However, most has more specific, applied objectives and concerns the development of new medicines or vaccines, improved diagnosis or better methods of toxicity testing. Since the process of producing medicines has changed significantly over time, we begin with a brief overview of developments from the late 19th century to the present. We then describe the way medicines are currently produced in terms of eight stages. These are: discovery and selection of compounds that could be effective medicines (stages 1 and 2), characterisation of promising candidate medicines (stages 3 and 4), selecting candidate medicines and ensuring their safety (stage 5), clinical studies on humans (stages 6 to 8), and also research carried out to support the medicine once it has been marketed. For each stage we describe the way in which animals are used in the process, and give some examples of specific experiments. As in the case of research described in the previous chapters, welfare implications for the animals involved in pharmaceutical research are as diverse as the types of research and must be considered on a case by case basis. In this chapter we focus on the use of animals on the development of medicines for use in humans. We also consider briefly vaccines1 and veterinary medicines.