Expert Comment

NewsLink opens in a new window has broken today that government has detailed for the first time how it aims to work toward phasing out animal testing. Dr Freya Harrison, Reader in Microbiology, School of Life Sciences, University of Warwick gives her reaction to the news and details on how her work at Warwick is part of this effort to safely reduce animal use in research.

Dr. Freya Harrison says: “The government’s pledge could incentivise a big step towards finding alternatives to animal testing of testing new medicines. Here at Warwick, we have developed a way of growing disease-causing microbes in lab conditions that mimic human infections, but don’t require the use of live animals.

“For instance, we have shown that you can buy lungs from pigs that have been killed for meat and use pieces of the lung tissue to simulate conditions in the lungs of people with cystic fibrosis. The lungs would otherwise just be thrown away.

"This methodLink opens in a new window has allowed us to explore how bacteria and fungi are able to establish such long-lived, antimicrobial-resistant infections in the lungs of people with cystic fibrosis, and to test potential new antimicrobial treatments to see how effective they are in these realistic conditions.

“There is so much creativity among researchers who are developing animal-free testing methods, and it would be fantastic to develop these to the point where they could completely replace live animals in antimicrobial drug development. To do that, we need investment so that we can be sure the models really do give an accurate enough understanding of what happens in a real, human infection.”