A world-leading animal testing laboratory in the UK closes the doors – Because the future is animal-free!

Great Britain is sending out an important signal for forward-looking research: The animal testing laboratory of the famous Sanger Institute is closed.
Official reason: Increased focus on modern, animal-free research systems.
The nationwide association Doctors Against Animal Experiments welcomes this strategy and urges animal testing laboratories in this country to use the signs of the time also.

The “Wellcome Sanger Institute” in Hinxton, UK, is one of the world’s leading centers for genome research. The charity is funded by the Wellcome Trust, the world’s second richest foundation to promote medical research.

Image: SOKO-MPI Tübingen

The institute near Cambridge employs 900 people, 70 of them in the animal testing laboratory. For the past 13 years, this has supplied thousands of researchers around the world with a variety of animals, including frogs, fish, rats and mice – many of them genetically modified.

Following an in-depth review of the Institute’s strategy, it was decided that the Animal Research Institute, which was built in 2006 for £ 30 million (just under € 34 million), will be closed by 2022 at the latest.

As the renowned scientific journal nature reports, the reason for the decision is the rapid global establishment of human-based research models such as 3-dimensional cell culture systems and organoids. They want to increasingly rely on these research systems, as they are forward-looking. For example, the Sanger Institute participates in the international Human Cell Atlas project, in which all cell types of the human body are characterized in detail.

“This decision is a great signal and a huge success for human-based, animal-free research that needs to be further developed and promoted,” says Dr. Tamara Zietek, scientist at Doctors Against Animal Experiments.
Dr. Zietek himself has been researching for years on 3-dimensional intestinal organoids at the TU Munich and witnessed the impressive development of these systems within the last 10 years.

“Animal testing facilities need to be closed to allow funding– either from the state or, as in this case, from a foundation- to be used to build new centers dedicated to high-performance human-based in vitro research.”

Berlin is a model for this research, where the new research campus “The Simulated Man” is currently being built.
Emphasis should be there the development of new immunotherapies with cancer.

“For tens of millions of dollars to build new animal laboratories, as it is planned, for example, in Hamburg, is economically and scientifically dumb and absolutely not forward-looking,” complains. med. Zietek.

https://www.aerzte-gegen-tierversuche.de/de/neuigkeiten/2945-weltweit-fuehrendes-tierversuchslabor-in-grossbritannien-schliesst-die-pforten

My comment: The well-known cancer researcher Dr. Irwin D. J. Bross, head of the Department of Life Statistics at the Roswell Park Memorial Institute in New York, said something very important about animal testing:

“Not a single drug for the treatment of human cancer was originally found through an animal experiment … The results of animal models of drugs or other remedies have caused nothing but confusion, and misled those cancer researchers who tried to draw conclusions from mice to humans pull. […]. From a scientific point of view, experiments on animals can therefore be described as pure fraud. Privately they (the experimenters) will admit that the animal model does not work, but they react with a “shrug of their shoulders” when asked if it works.

The animal experiment is simply a criminal method that must be abolished. We do not need alternatives for that. But we need a completely new system. So an animal-free research system. “

My best regards to all, Venus