(no subject)
New FDA Guidelines Help to Reduce Animal Use
Earlier this month the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued new guidelines regarding drug testing, allowing researchers to micro-dose experimental drugs on human volunteers. Previously, scientists could not test their new drugs on humans in the early stages of investigation; they could only be used during the clinical phase (the last phase) of testing, thus creating a reliance on animals. Acting FDA Commissioner Dr. Andrew von Eschenback said that rules have been outlined to protect the human volunteers and added that the change in guidelines was warranted because 90% of experimental drugs fail in clinical testing, noting that drug compounds "behave differently in people than in animals." It is believed that this change could help reduce the numbers of animals used in research.
To read the story that appears on latimes.com entitled "FDA Issues Rules on Testing New Drugs" click on the following link. Please note that AAVS is not responsible for the content of this article or broken links. http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-011206fda_lat,0,5408373.story?coll=la.
Finally, some progress!