UK universities will shift their reliance on income streams from funding antiquated animal testing (commercial contracts and research) to the funding of innovation in bio-sciences.

According to the governments 'Strategy for UK Life Sciences' launched in 2011 by the Dept for Business Innovation & Skills, innovation is key.

'if we are to remain competitive, we must up our game in the UK. Everyone agrees that the challenge is to put human clinical disease studies back at the heart of medical discovery, where they have always belonged. If we can become better at recognising and rewarding innovation; ensure that good ideas don't get lost; and adopt them more quickly and efficiently across the NHS, then we can deliver better patient outcomes at home and take a leading role in life sciences globally.'

In addition to failing patients, the decline in pharmaceutical R&D efficiency fails the UK economy and the capacity of UK pharmaceutical companies to be competitive globally against emerging markets.

Drug development data:

1. The development of a new pharmaceutical drug takes between 12 - 15 years.

2. It costs billions of pounds to bring a new drug to market e.g. Astra Zeneca spend 5.7 billion GBP per drug.

3. Nineteen out of twenty experimental drugs fail in clinical studies because experiments on animals cannot predict how the drug will behave in humans. 95% of drugs tested on animals fail.

This is not a sustainable business model. CEO's of large pharmaceutical companies acknowledge the current drug development model i.e. the animal model - is an extremely expensive and slow research method by which to discover whether or not a drug will be a failure in terms of human benefit. Their 'vision' for the future of successful drug development is to use methods that succeed, or if they fail to 'fail quickly and cheaply'. Only human-based research methods can achieve this.

The Home Office statistics for 2013-2014
4,033.310 animals were used in experiments, around 75% of these were categorised as 'basic research' (curiosity driven) which masqueraded as 'applied research' ) allegedly beneficial for humans) by falsely claiming to be 'predictive' of the responses of human patients, thereby essential in the search to find cures for illnesses such as cancer, heart disease and multiple sclerosis, In addition, 13% of lab animals were claimed by the Home Office as 'predictive' for the safety testing of new human medicines.

These statistics are further explained in a recent medical blog by leading expert Dr Ray Greek, and the misplaced funding of such experiments was the focus of the British Medical Jounal, Editors Choice June 2014, titled 'How Predictive and Productive is Animal Research?'

Innovative modern scientists are already developing human-based research methods, harnessing modern digital technologies and collaborating in trans-disciplinary projects. But the speed of developing these innovations is hindered by lack of public funding: animal experimentation still receives the lion's share of research grants.

A 70-year old law mandates animal testing in pre-clinical trials as a safety stage intended to protect people in clinical trials for new drugs. However, in reality, the unreliability of the data from these tests on animals exposes human volunteers to substantial and serious harm. Examples can be cited to illustrate this but most notably is the 2006 Northwick Park incident in which 6 healthy men were left fighting for their lives due to organ failure during a routine clinical trial.

After they were all admitted to intensive care, two became critically ill, the worst affected lost his fingers and toes, and all the men were subsequently told they would be likely to develop cancers or auto-immune diseases as a result of their exposure to the drug.

It's widely acknowledged by the scientific community that the pre-clinical tests on animals of the drug TGN1412 prior to the clinical trial showed NO signs of organ failure.

The replacement of pre-clinical animal testing with modern human-based safety tests are therefore essential in preventing these incidents in clinical trials. Safety tests such as Skimune, developed by a team at Newcastle University, is an example of why it's a scientific necessity to replace animals with modern technologies not just an ethical one. 'It uses real human skin and immune cells to show any reaction such as a rash or blistering indicating a wider immune response within the body' ...and 'eliminates the risk of adverse reactions to new drugs, cosmetics and household chemicals.'

Professor Dickinson who headed up the team explained: "Our Skimune test would have predicted the terrible outcome at Northwick Park in 2006. Then six men taking part in a clinical trial had severe reactions to a monoclonal antibody resulting in organ failure. Previous laboratory and animal research gave no indication that this was likely to occur. Our test would have picked up the risk because it is a skin-based model of the human immune response."

Professor Richard Stebbings, Principle Scientist at the National Institute for Biological Standards and Control (NIBSC) praised Skimune for its superior scientific efficacy compared to animal experiments condemning the latter as "...poorly predictive of human responses."

Hyped News Headlines of Promising Cures

'News of a medical breakthrough inevitably raises our hopes that a new treatment will become available. But, as people waiting for new treatments know only too well, drugs that look promising in early research rarely reach the pharmacists' shelves. For every 100,000 chemicals researched, only four are eventually licensed for prescription.

This low outcome is often because early results in test tube experiments or in animal models do not translate into results in humans, despite all those optimistic headlines'.

(MAKING SENSE OF DRUG SAFETY SCIENCE. Chapter 01. Page 7. Produced with support from Medical Research Council.)