Why damaging dogs is not an effective way to better diagnosis and treatments for people with osteoarthritis

This is a photograph of a small beagle dog, under anaesthetic and laid on a table in preparation for a 2kg weight to be dropped on her bent knee.

To artificially create an arthritic-like knee in a perfectly healthy dog requires an awful instrument known as the dropping tower. This device drops a 2 kg weight onto the bent hind leg of an anaesthetised dog – most commonly a beagle, but Labradors, golden retrievers and German shepherd dogs are also used for this. The … Read more

Humanising mice – more an exercise in testing the limits of the technology and less an answer to understanding hepatitis C infection.

The image shows six mice, lying other sides, with their faces pushed into plastic tubing delivering anaesthetic gas. The mice all have bright areas on their sides that indicates where they have tumours growing.

Modifying tumour cells from malignant liver cancer so that they shine brightly under specific conditions might seem like a neat trick. That is until you realise that this will not help diagnose, detect or eradicate cancer in people. Instead, these modified human cells are destined to be injected into a mouse, to generate a huge … Read more

Science in transit- the move away from animals in research

In December 2016, I was invited by the European Commission to speak on a scientific panel at the conference Non-Animal Approaches – The Way Forward. The event was organised as part of the EU’s response to the citizen’s initiative ‘Stop Vivisection,’ which presented more than one million supporting signatures from across the EU to the … Read more

Monkeys in glass tubes and rats on rolling rods are not the answer for early diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease in people.

World Parkinson’s Day (April 11th) aims to raise awareness of Parkinson’s disease and the desperate need for effective new treatments. However, many people may not be aware of how animals suffer in labs, used for research into Parkinson’s disease, when the answers we need may lie with patient-centred research and not animal testing. For people, … Read more

Don’t go breaking my heart…

What do self-driving cars, solar airplanes and renewable energy have in common with the human heart? At first thought, not a great deal, yet a recent scientific endeavour called the Living Heart Project has brought together experts in engineering, aeronautics and energy to produce a sophisticated new model of the human heart for use in … Read more

Finding better treatments for tuberculosis, the computer is mightier than the mouse

In March of 1882, Robert Koch used tissue from infected guinea pigs to show that the lung disease tuberculosis (TB) is caused by the organism Mycobacterium tuberculosis. At that time, TB (or ‘consumption’, as it was then known) was a constant presence in the population, infecting between 70 to 90 percent of people in urban … Read more