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I'm not sure what the questions are, but dammit - we want answers!
This is my blog. Mostly it is a place to share the things that I have been up to with my family and friends. I also use it to remind myself of what I have done and where I have been - sort of like a surrogate online memory...
Drugs trials support
Sir,—Angus Ramsay (April 12) says an inquiry into the recent drug-trial disaster is needed.
Patient-safety group, Europeans for Medical Progress, agrees.
We believe a vital part of any inquiry should be a comparison of animal tests with microdosing, sophisticated human tissue tests, such as those conducted by Glasgow-based Biopta, and other state-of-the-art methods of predicting human safety.
The six unfortunate men in the drug trial were reassured that TGN1412 was safe because it was safe in animals.
Withdrawn arthritis drug Vioxx caused hundreds of thousands of heart attacks and strokes, after animal tests had predicted it would be good for the heart.
The truth is that superior human-based tests could have predicted the effects of both TGN1412 and Vioxx, where animal tests failed so tragically.
Kathy Archibald.
Director,
Europeans for Medical Progress,
PO Box 38604,
London.
Animal tests still necessary
Sir,—Europeans for Medical Progress describe themselves (April 19) as a patient-safety group but they are nothing of the sort.
They are an anti-vivi section organisation who make ill-founded claims about the scientific validity of animal research.
These claims were recently debunked by the Advertising Standards Authority who upheld five complaints against a leaflet they distributed under a previous name, Europeans for Medical Advancement.
In their letter, they claim that “superior human-based tests could have predicted the effects of both TGN 1412 and Vioxx, where animal tests failed so tragically”.
In fact, human-based methods are already part of the research process and would have been used in these cases.
Microdosing is a potentially valuable tool indicating how drugs are metabolised by the body, but it does not provide information on toxicity.
EMP give no indication as to how a microdose would be determined in the absence of animal data — the human volunteers were given doses 500 times lower than that given to the monkeys, a microdose by anyone’s standards.
And some substances are so toxic that what might be estimated to be a microdose could still be lethal to a volunteer, for example, ricin, which is also toxic to animals and so would not pass the animal research stage.
TGN 1412 is a relatively a new kind of drug.
When we have studied more drugs of this type— and this will include animal studies—we will have information to better predict their action, and better computer modelling of their effects.
Until then, for the safety of human volunteers, we must use all tools available including animal research.
Robin Wilkinson.
RDS: Understanding Animal Research in Medicine,
25 Shaftesbury Avenue,
London.
Fraser is known throughout the snow-blade world as one of the sport's top stunters. Here he shows his most ambitious stunt to date - the 'do a really tiny jump then fall on your arse doing a 360 degree spin'. This move will surely enter the record books as one of the most spectacular ever...