Question: Do you use animals in the development of your vaccines? If so is this necessary?

Helen Fletcher answered on 15 Jun 2011:

Hi, we do use animals to develop vaccines. We use mice to test vaccines are safe and to screen potential vaccines for testing in humans. Mice are actually not very good models for selecting vaccines for TB, HIV and malaria (otherwise we would already have vaccines for these diseases). It is though a requirement of the UK MHRA and also ethics committees that we test vaccines in animals before giving them to humans. The immune response is highly complex and we just don’t know enough about all the complex cellular interactions to be able to do the testing in tissue culture rather than a mouse. There have been awful problems is the past with people giving a treatment to humans without extensively testing its safety in animals http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/4811626.stm. We have a duty to be very careful and animal testing is part of that process. There are scientists who are trying to figure out all the complex cellular interactions so that they can create cell culture systems as alternatives to working with mice. It will be many years though before we will be able to use these alternatives. All animal work is done under the strictest conditions, see here for more info. http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/science-research/animal-research/
We have to use the smallest number of animals possible and prove there is no alternative to using a mouse. We also have to minimise suffering to the animal and give pain relief/anaesthesia before giving the vaccines. All people who work with animals have to be trained and issued with a Home Office licence. Everything is done under the supervision of a vet and everything has to be recorded and reported back to the Home Office. It’s not perfect. In a perfect world we wouldn’t have to use animals. If you do have to use animals the best place to do it in the world is in the UK because we have the highest standards of animal welfare and strictest legal requirements of anywhere. There are very active animal rights campaigners in the UK and that is a fantastic thing. The close scrutiny means that the welfare standards in UK animal labs are exceptionally high. Animal testing is a difficult issue and hard to discuss on a message board but I hope this has been a useful answer for you!