The conventional way of determining whether a new drug for dogs works is by testing it on research dogs, ultimately euthanizing them in order to examine the internal effects on their bodies.
In consideration of animal welfare, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is looking for alternative research approaches that don’t require animal testing.
Toward that end, the agency is proposing a study to collect information that would eliminate the need for experimental animals in certain types of research. The study itself does entail the use of 24 dogs, but the dogs would be subject only to “minimally invasive blood sampling” and adopted out as pets afterward, according to a statement by FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD.
This article highlights the scope for developing therapeutics with new innovative, alternative approaches. The current trillion dollars pharmaceutical industry is in peril where the current drug development pipeline is slow, inefficient and incapable of being extended to multi-combination drug therapies as well as minimally focused on prevention. The complex modeling of diseases and biological functions has been limited because of the inability to integrate large scale molecular pathways.
Watch this Video to understand how recent advances provide breakthrough technology for doing scalable modeling of complex molecular systems to dramatically accelerate drug discovery and development.