The German Animal Welfare Association has sharply criticized a new EU joint project that is to receive 17.5 million euros in research funding. The “NHPig” project aims to initiate non-clinical safety tests of pharmaceuticals to be carried out on pigs instead of primates in the future and speaks of an “increase in animal welfare”, among other things.
Animal testing on primates is currently still required by law in the EU for certain drug safety tests, even though their use is actually particularly restricted under the EU Animal Experiments Directive and should be avoided. “Animal testing with non-human primates, our closest relatives, should be abolished, no question about it. But replacing primates with pigs and therefore talking about an “increase in animal welfare” is absurd and shifts the animal suffering and ethical problems from one species to another,” comments Jessica Rosolowski, a consultant for animal-free science at the German Animal Welfare Association. The project also contradicts the EU's goal of replacing animal testing with animal-free methods. “The approach of advancing modern and humane methods is completely ignored,” criticizes Rosolowski.
MILLIONS OF EUROS FOR ANIMAL TESTING
17.5 million euros are to flow into the NHPig project, of which 8,499,555 euros are EU funds. In the view of the German Animal Welfare Association, this funding should have been used entirely for animal-free methods. In addition to universities and research institutes, companies and large industrial partners are also involved in the project. Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München is coordinating the project and has received the largest amount of funding among the project partners with 1,039,604 euros after the Technical University of Munich with 1,900,375 euros.
PROGRESS ALSO POSSIBLE WITHOUT ANIMAL SUFFERING
The German Animal Welfare Association is calling for research to be carried out using human-based, animal-free methods instead of continuing to rely on animal models. For example, the cultivation of tissues and organs from human cells in the laboratory or the possibilities of 3D printing of organs are very promising. If cells from human patients are used here, which can be artificially restored to the state of stem cells, therapeutic approaches can even be individualized. Species differences and the difficulty of transferring results from animal experiments to humans are also eliminated.
Interested parties can find out more about how biomedical research and science can work without animal testing in the German Animal Welfare Association's “Guide to Animal-Free Science”.
