A project that’s taking the first steps towards ending the use of horses in India and elsewhere to treat diphtheria has succeeded. And the Science Consortium is already working on its next target – replacing the use of horses to make a treatment for black widow spider bites – and won‘t stop until animals are no longer used to make these drugs.
Funded by the PETA International Science Consortium Ltd and carried out
at the Institute of Biochemistry, Biotechnology, and Bioinformatics at the
Technische Universität Braunschweig in Germany, the project created fully
human-derived antibodies capable of blocking the poisonous toxin that causes
diphtheria. The results of the research were just published in Scientific
Reports (a research journal published by Nature Publishing Group) and
covered on 17 January in an article in Science.
Diphtheria is a potentially deadly infectious disease causing severe
respiratory distress and damage to vital organs. For more than 100 years,
the main method of producing the antitoxin to treat it has been to inject
horses repeatedly with the diphtheria toxin and then drain huge amounts of
their blood in order to collect the antibodies that their immune systems
produce to fight the disease. Not only does this animal-derived antitoxin
have the potential to cause serious allergic reactions in patients who
receive it, global health authorities also report having difficulty
acquiring sufficient stockpiles of it to respond quickly to diphtheria
outbreaks.
Inspections of facilities where horses are used to produce animal-derived antitoxins have found widespread neglect of animal welfare, with horses confined to filthy, severely crowded enclosures and suffering from anaemia, diseased hooves, eye abnormalities, infections, parasites, and malnutrition.
Rather than using horses, the researchers involved in this project used human blood cells to generate human-derived antibodies that block the diphtheria toxin. The Science Consortium is now working with its research partners to ensure that the non-animal antitoxin is developed into a medicine that will be used to treat this menacing disease more reliably and safely, without causing a single horse to suffer.
The Science Consortium is already working on its next target – replacing the use of horses to make a treatment for black widow spider bites – and won‘t stop until animals are no longer used to make these drugs.
Return to Alternatives to Animal Testing, Experimentation and Dissection