Spinal cord injury research hampered by animal models, says...( WashingtonResearch on traumatic spin...),Health

WashingtonResearch on traumatic spinal cord injuries is hampered by a reliance on animal experiments that dont accurately predict human outcomes, says a new study in the upcoming edition of the peer-reviewed journal Reviews in the Neurosciences. The review was written by scientists with the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.

Despite decades of animal experiments, we still dont have a drug to cure spinal cord injury in humans, says Aysha Akhtar, a neurologist with PCRM and the lead author. According to the Journal of the American Paraplegic Society, at least 22 agents were found to improve spinal cord injury in animals, but not one of these was helpful in humans, says Dr. Akhtar.

The paper outlines the numerous problems with translating animal data into effective human treatments, including the many variations between laboratory-induced injuries in animals and human injuries, the difficulties in interpreting functional outcomes in animals, and the multitude of inter-species differences in physiology and anatomy.

The extrapolation problem, in general, has been widely acknowledged by scientists of many disciplines and affiliations. According to data from the Food and Drug Administration, more than 90 percent of drugs that proved successful in animal tests are not approved for wider use after clinical trials in humans. In February, three U.S. government agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Toxicology Program announced a major new program aimed at ending the use of animals in safety testing of new chemicals and drugs.

Because of the extrapolation challenge, some fields, such as cancer research and toxicity testing, are moving toward a greater use of alternatives. Unfortunately, spinal cord research, a relatively newer endeavor, is not yet learning from the failure of other fields of inquiry. As Dr. Akhtar warns, We need to develop new, more ef
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