New medicines without animal testing

Despite the EU imposing increasingly stringent requirements for scientific animal experiments, more and more animals are being used to test new medicines. A number of European research institutions and pharmaceutical companies are bent on breaking away from this practice.

– We must avoid as many animal experiments as possible when developing new medicines, says Professor Annette Bauer-Brandl from the Drug Transport and Delivery research group at the Department of Physics, Chemistry and Pharmacy at the University of Southern Denmark.

She points out that although animal experiments cannot be completely avoided, it is possible to reduce their extent by ‘testing’ medicine on computers instead of animals – and there are several advantages to this.

Cooperation with industry

– There are several aspects to the use of computers: The ethics of animal welfare – tests are not only frequently performed on mice and rats, but also pigs and monkeys. Added to this, using computers is a huge time-saver, because it allows us to develop new medicines in a matter of years instead of decades, and that’s great for the patients, she says.

Together with colleagues in her research group – Professor Martin Brandl and Associate Professor Paul Stein, and 18 other partner institutions from other EU countries, she is involved in the new EU-funded project, InPharma.

The main idea of the project is to assign 13 young researchers to their own research project so that they can earn a PhD in different approaches to working with the development of medicine without the use of laboratory animals and thus contribute to the dissemination of knowledge about new methods. The projects are carried out as a collaboration between research institutions and the industry.

The computer is the new laboratory animal

The aim of the project is to find ways to avoid animal trials in all key stages of drug development: When researchers discover a new, promising substance, it should not be tested on animals. Instead, a large variety of data on the substance should be obtained by animal-free experiments.

This data must then be fed to computer models tasked with calculating the most optimal formulation (‘recipe’) for a new medicine. Finally, this ‘recipe’ must be fed to other computer models that will simulate how people will react to the medicine.

SDU will host three PhD students, who will spend half their time in SDU’s laboratories and the other half at the pharmaceutical companies Roche, Janssen and Solvias.

Humans do not always react like animals

– An ancient method used in drug development is to induce things in animals and see how they react. Until now, no other methods were available, and it has been the best way to test new medical substances. However, this test method just isn’t very effective, it takes a long time and a lot of animals are needed, says Annette Bauer-Brandl.

In addition, animals and humans are not alike:

– You can work with a substance or formulation that many different animals react to as intended, but once we initiate clinical trials and test it on humans, they can react surprisingly differently. Animals are not humans, she explains.

Computers doing the donkey work

This is where computers come into the picture. Today, they are so powerful that they can simulate the extremely complex reactions of an organism exposed to a substance, thus showing researchers how an organism will react to it.

Aided by computers, researchers can not only simulate an organism’s reaction to new substances and their formulations – they can also understand what is happening in the organism.

– The goal is that computers will allow us to reach fully simulated experiments on test subjects without using laboratory animals. From there, we can then move on to clinical trials with real test subjects, which is the last step before a drug can be released, says Annette Bauer-Brandl.