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FDA trial may help to cut the number of dogs used in clinical trials

pharmafile | November 19, 2018 | News story | Sales and Marketing |  Animal testing, animal activists, clinical trials, dogs, health, tests 

A new study may help to significantly reduce the number of dogs that are used in clinical trials, according to a statement released by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Currently, when testing orally administered, anti-parasitic, canine drugs, the dogs on which these drugs are tested are first infected with parasites and then euthanized on completion of the clinical trial.

However a new study may allow the FDA to simply rely on non-invasive blood tests alone and as such, the dogs involved in clinical trials could be adopted on completion of the trial.

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The new study will seek to set a benchmark for how these drugs are absorbed into the dogs’ blood. It is then hoped that the data collected will help to create an informatics tool that can model the absorption of drugs in the future.

“The aim is this: by doing a single study to help establish a non-animal based model, we can potentially replace much of the need to use dogs in future trials with new informatics tools. In short, our goal is to do one single study involving a small number of dogs—where the dogs will only be subject to minimally invasive blood sampling, and adopted as pets at the completion of the short trial—to eliminate the need for the use of dogs in certain types of future studies, some where they might have been euthanized,” the statement says.

The FDA is accepting public comment over the next 60 days.

Louis Goss

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