The Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) is one of the world’s largest and most influential scientific organizations, representing as it does 23 independent scientific societies and over 90,000 individual scientists. As a coalition that represents tens of thousands of US medical researchers FASEB has policies and positions on all kinds of issues which affect scientific research, from federal funding of research to the legal status of embryonic stem cells and human cloning, and you will probably not be altogether surprised to learn that FASEB has taken a very strong position in support of animal research and the scientists who undertake it.
FASEB also takes its responsibility to educate and inform members of the public about the role of biomedical research very seriously and has produced the excellent Breakthroughs in Bioscience, a series of essays written with the help of leading scientists on the research that led to important advances in medicine. While these essays do not of course focus solely on the role of animals in research, key discoveries have after all been made through approaches as disparate as clinical observations and X-ray crystallography, they do illustrate how important animal research has been as an integral and frequently vital part of the research process.
The most recent essay entitled Magic Bullets and Monoclonals: An Antibody Tale is a great example of this; I would encourage anyone who is interested in finding out how the role of antibodies in the immune system was first uncovered and how this eventually lead to the development of these “magic bullets” to read it.
A couple of years ago I wrote on the Pro-Test blog about the role of animal research in the development of the monoclonal antibody drug Lucentis that is used to treat the wet form of age-related macular degeneration, a common form of blindness , but it is only one example out of many. The Breakthroughs in Bioscience essay focuses on the development other monoclonal antibody drugs including Rituximab, a treatment for cancers of the immune system such as non-Hodgkin lymphoma, infliximab, a treatment for autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, and trastuzumab, better known as Herceptin and used to treat breast cancer. While the essay discusses how animals were vital to the production of these monoclonal antibody drugs, the contribution of animal research to the development of these treatments went far beyond just that, as the following two examples illustrate.
Herceptin (1) targets the HER2/neu receptor, a protein whose normal function is to regulate the growth of cells but which is produced in excess in some breast cancers where it promotes tumor growth. HER2 was first discovered to have a role in cancer through studies of cancer in rats and mice, and scientists following up on this discovery then found that it was over-produced in some breast cancers. Subsequently research in transgenic mice enabled scientists to understand how HER2 promoted tumor growth, while xenograft models where immunodeficient mice wre injected with of HER2 positive human breast cancer cells were used to screen candidate monoclonal antibodies, eventually identifying the antibody that was taken into successful human trials as trastuzumab.
The story was similar for infliximab, which works by blocking the action of a chemical messenger called Tumour Necrosis Factor-alpha (TNF-alpha) that promotes inflammation and is a key factor in the development of several autoimmune disorders. Studies in rodents and dogs played a key role in the isolation and identification of TNF-alpha, and in subsequently animal research that demonstrated its role in both the normal immune system and in inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. This work included studies in transgenic mice which provided the definitive evidence that TNF-alpha plays a crucial role in the development of rheumatoid arthritis , which formed the basis for studies which demonstrated that a chimeric human/mouse monoclonal antibody against TNF-alpha could protect transgenic mice which produced human TNF-alpha from inflammation-induced cachexia (2). Follow up studies in transgenic mice expressing human TNF-alpha provided important pre-clinical information about the safety of infleximab (3).
The examples above show just how important animal research is to both basic research which seeks to understand what is going on in normal physiology and disease, and translational research which seeks to take that knowledge and apply it to developing treatments that can be used effectively in the clinic. We’re delighted by the work that FASEB is doing to ensure that the public is aware of how all types of research contribute to medical progress, and hope that they continue these efforts for many years to come.
1) Pegram M. and Ngo D. “Application and potential limitations of animal models utilized in the development of trastuzumab (HerceptinR): A case study” Advanced Drug Delivery Reviews Volume 58, Pages 723-734 (2006) DOI:10.1016/j.addr.2006.05.003
2) Siegel S.A. et al. “The Mouse/Human Chimeric Monoclonal Antibody cA2 Neutralizes TNF In Vitro and Protects Transgenic Mice from Cachexia and TNF Lethality In Vivo” Cytokine Volume 7(1), Pages 15-25 (1995) DOI:10.1006/cyto.1995.1003
3) European Medicines Agency report http://www.ema.europa.eu/humandocs/PDFs/EPAR/Remicade/190199en6.pdf