Sensitising science to research involving animals

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Rebekah Humphreys explores desensitisation, our emotional responses and moral feelings within the context of research involving animals.

Dr Rebekah Humphreys, senior lecturer at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, UK, and specialist in applied ethics, considers how it is possible to become desensitised to the use of animals for scientific research. Humphreys explores our emotional responses and moral feelings towards animals within the context of research. She considers those who work in animal research and the […]

Trastuzumab-based therapeutics: Choosing the appropriate species for safety studies

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Dr Gail Lewis Phillips researches trastuzumab based therapies and argues that rodents are not the best choice for safety studies as the equivalent antigen (neu) does not bind

Trastuzumab is a clinically approved monoclonal antibody therapy which targets HER2 (or ErbB2) for treatment of HER2-overexpressing breast and gastric cancers. Safety studies are important in the development of antibody therapeutics and should use animal species which bind the target antigen (HER2) to understand target-mediated effects, in addition to a non-binding species to observe non-targeted effects. It is acknowledged that […]

Can animal-free research be the future of medical science?

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scientists undertake tests in a laboratory

Professor Merel Ritskes-Hoitinga from Radboud University, the Netherlands, aims to improve biomedical and medical research, reduce the use of unnecessary animal studies and replace animal studies by using better alternatives. Throughout her career she has researched and highlighted the disadvantages of animal studies, such as the substandard quality of results produced and lack of evidence for translatability to human clinical […]