I talked with Dr. Nuno Henrique Franco about animal welfare in scientific research. The questions we address are

Why do we do animal experiments?What can be done to reduce the amount of animal experiments?What are the regulations for animal research?What do scientists think about the ethics of animal experimentation?What is being done for outreach?

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Nuno Franco is an expert on animal wellbeing in scientific research. He works as an assistant researcher at the “Instituto de Investigação e Inovação em Saúde” (Institute for Health Investigation and Innovation), or short i3S in Porto, Portugal. He worked on animal welfare, and animal ethics regulation, and he currently coordinates the national network of animal welfare bodies.

Why do we do animal experiments?

Animal research is mostly done in the context of health research. Researchers use animals instead of humans, because human experimentation at this level would be unethical. They also don’t make good study subjects from a practical standpoint. The history of medical research shows that animal research translates well to humans in most cases.

The consensus is that animal suffering should be minimized

In order to make animal experimentation conduct as humanely as possible, international legislation applies the 3R principle:

Replace animal use where animal-free methods would provide equal or better results.Reduce the amount of animals used per experiment, and make the experiments as informative as possible.Refine experimental protocols to cause as little pain, suffering, and distress as possible.

When talking about methods to test the toxicity of compounds, animal testing is successfully replaced by animal-free methods. For example by using cells grown in a dish. As soon as they have been validated, these methods can be implemented on a larger scale. This makes them very cost efficient. The development, however, is expensive and it does involve animal experiments.

Animal testing for cosmetics was banned by the EU, and it is further illegal to sell cosmetics for which new tests on animals were conducted. Only compounds used for medical purposes still need to be tested on animals for safety reasons.

When we talk about physiological research, the replacement of experiments by animal-free methods is less feasible. Of course there are - and always have been - animal-free methods which have advantages for specific questions. And often studies are animal free up until the point at which the questions concern the whole animal. Animal-free “in vitro” methods are being further developed. The latest innovations being “organs on a chip”, and “organoids”. Both represent miniature versions of single organs and have some degree of complexity beyond 'simple' cell cultures.

What are the limits of animal-free methods?

I am a neuroscientist, and in neuroscience, “organoids” have been hyped as “mini brains”. This is a crude exaggerations. While they do have neurons connecting to some degree, they are still far from being actual brains. Some researchers even raised the ethical issues of perfecting neuronal organoids to actual “mini brains”. Could such a brain experience suffering? Anyways, in neuroscience, in the end, we need to study the function of the nervous system in the context of animal behavior. And for that, we need the whole living animal.

And this leads us to the final conclusion on the limitations of artificial “in vitro” (cell cultures, organoids, etc) and “in silico” (computer models) methods for studying physiology. In order to recreate the whole physiological system of an animal, and study it, we need to already know everything there is to know about that animal. In other words, we would not need the model anymore.

Which regulations do researchers need to comply with?

There is a whole lot. The researcher needs to be licensed, the animal keeping facility needs to be licensed,