Question: Do you test on animals for your medicine and treatments and if so, would you consider using animals that have the naturally occuring disease instead of making the disease on an otherwise healthy animal?

Sophie Strickfuss answered on 30 Mar 2022:

Hi again, you have seen my answer on your other questions on new cancer drugs. My answer for this question is similar.
* if we use animals who happens to have the disease, it might be difficult to get enough animals for testing, and, if we do, there will be other factors making the interpretation of the study difficult, like different age, other health factors, gender…
* the naturally occurring disease in animals might not be comparable to the disease in people, so a drug might work in animals but not in people, or the other way around!

By using a controlled animal population “made” to develop the human disease in question, scientists can complete very controlled experiments using as few animals as possible. There are also a lot of regulations to ensure the animals are treated well, and that no unnecessary tests are conducted.