Senior, Friends School of Baltimore, Baltimore, MD, USA.
Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing (CAAT), Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA.
ALTEX. 2018;35(3):275-305. doi: 10.14573/altex.1807041.
For a long time, the discussion about animal testing vs its alternatives centered on animal welfare. This was a static warfare, or at least a gridlock, where life scientists had to take a position and make their value choices and hardly anyone changed sides. Technical advances have changed the frontline somewhat, with in vitro and in silico methods gaining more ground. Only more recently has the economic view begun to have an impact: Many animal tests are simply too costly, take too long, and give misleading results. As an extension and update to previous articles in this series written a decade ago, we reanalyze the economic landscape of especially regulatory use of animal testing and this time also consider respective alternative tests. Despite some ambiguity and data gaps, which we have filled with crude estimates, a picture emerges of globally regulated industries that are subject to stark geographic and sectorial differences in regulation, which determine their corresponding animal use. Both animal testing and its alternatives are industries in their own right, offering remarkable business opportunities for biotech and IT companies as well as contract research organizations. In light of recent revelations as to the reproducibility and relevance issues of many animal tests, the economic consequences of incorrect results and the reasons for still maintaining often outdated animal test approaches are discussed.
长期以来，关于动物测试及其替代方法的讨论都集中在动物福利上。这是一场静态的战争，或者至少是僵局，生命科学家不得不做出选择，做出自己的价值选择，几乎没有人改变立场。技术进步在一定程度上改变了前线，体外和计算机模拟方法获得了更多的发展。直到最近，经济观点才开始产生影响：许多动物测试过于昂贵、耗时过长，而且结果存在误导性。作为对十年前该系列文章的扩展和更新，我们重新分析了动物测试在监管方面的经济状况，这次还考虑了各自的替代测试。尽管存在一些模糊性和数据差距，我们用粗略的估计填补了这些差距，但仍出现了一幅全球受监管行业的图景，这些行业在监管方面存在明显的地域和部门差异，这决定了它们相应的动物使用情况。动物测试及其替代方法本身就是两个产业，为生物技术和 IT 公司以及合同研究组织提供了显著的商业机会。鉴于最近有报道称许多动物测试的可重复性和相关性问题，以及不正确结果的经济后果，以及为何仍要维持往往过时的动物测试方法的原因，我们讨论了这些问题。
