New method of animal lab testing proposed

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind., March 11 (UPI) -- A Purdue University scientist says adding environmental variables to laboratory mouse testing would increase the accuracy of such experiments.

Assistant Professor Joseph Garner says the traditional practice in animal testing has been standardization. But when he and his colleagues compared results from multiple mice experiments set up in a standardized manner against multiple experiments set up with controlled variables they found substantially greater differences in the traditionally formatted experiments.

The study showed adding as few as two controlled environmental variables to pre-clinical mouse tests can greatly reduce costly false positives, the number of animals needed for testing and the cost of pharmaceutical trials.

Garner says the findings challenge the assumption in drug discovery and related fields that animal experiments should eliminate all variables. He said despite standardization efforts, two experiments in different labs could never truly be exactly the same because of uncontrollable variables such as the scent of the researchers or background noises.

Garner said about 90 percent of drugs thought to be effective in mice fail in human trials. Reducing the number of drugs that won't be successful could eliminate hundreds of millions of dollars per drug in some cases and reduce the cost of research and development that is passed on to consumers.

The study is reported in the journal Nature Methods.