Australian lab closure is a chance to phase out animals
An Alternatives to Animal Testing, Experimentation and Dissection Article from All-Creatures.org

FROM CAARE Citizens for Alternatives to Animal Research
July 2021

Please send a letter to ask the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) of Australia to redirect funding to superior, human-relevant alternatives. 

Rats in isolation cages

The Animal Resource Centre (ARC) in Western Australia, a government subsidized facility that supplies mice and rats to laboratories, recently announced its upcoming closure due to financial difficulties. This closure presents a unique opportunity for the Australian government to invest in non-animal research rather than strive to perpetuate outdated animal experiments.

Please send a polite letter to ask the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) of Australia to redirect funding to superior, human-relevant alternatives.

ARC is a major supplier of mice and rats to laboratories in Australia and other parts of the world. While some researchers are fretting about losing access to animals, others are speaking out about the urgent need to replace animals with superior, human-relevant alternatives.

Dr. Bret Lidbury, a scientific advisor to Humane Research Australia, points out, “Animal models are 90-95% ineffective at predicting human disease. The overwhelming evidence suggests animal models are in no way the best way to study human disease.”

“There are credible advances away from animal models,” he notes, “but getting those alternatives validated and accepted by broader research culture is proving difficult…There is almost no significant funding to take alternatives and run large validation studies”.

The ARC is the second substantial facility of its type to close in the past two years. In 2019, the Wellcome Sanger Institute in the UK shut down its animal research facility that bred thousands of genetically modified mice, shifting its focus to human relevant research such as advanced organoids and the Human Cell Atlas Project.

Cellular test

When the Sanger Institute closed, biotech entrepreneur, Dr. Jonathan Milner applauded the move, noting, “The world is moving away from animal experimentation. Sanger and the University of Cambridge are absolutely right in exploring cellular alternatives to animal testing because you can get misleading results.”