RETHINK report supports role for minipigs in drug testing

Published: 2-Nov-2010

Could contribute to greater drug safety for patients and consumers, it says


Minipigs have many advantages for drug and chemical safety testing and could improve drug safety for humans, a European group of more than 40 industry, government and academic experts has found.

The group’s RETHINK report, funded by the EU, deals with the impact and animal welfare implications of minipigs in safety testing of new medicines and other products. It includes 20 proposals to optimise how minipigs are used in safety testing.

Minipigs are miniature pig breeds that are easier to handle and better suited to a laboratory environment than farmyard pigs. The Göttingen minipig, developed at the University of Göttingen in Germany, and bred commercially in Denmark, is the leading breed in Europe.

‘The ethical issues of using minipigs were carefully addressed and we did not identify major differences compared with other non-rodent species,’ said Roy Forster, coordinator of the RETHINK project and chief scientific officer of CIT, a French non-clinical contract research organisation.

‘All that we saw convinced us that the minipig has a very useful role to play in safety testing and it probably provides better prediction of drug safety for patients than traditional models such as rats and dogs.’

The RETHINK initiative has been welcomed by Professor Beatriz Silva Lima, chairwoman of the Safety Working Party of the European Medicines Agency.

‘This report fills a gap in our knowledge on the usefulness of animals in safety testing and provides additional scientific basis for the selection of the best animal model,’ she said.

The RETHINK steering committee consists of Forster; Gerd Bode, pharmaceutical industry veteran; Lars Ellegaard, founder of the Ellegaard Minipigs breeding company; and Jan Willem van der Laan, senior assessor for pharmaceuticals with the Dutch Authorities.

Copies of the RETHINK report, published in the Journal of Harmacological and Toxicological Methods, will be sent to government agencies and committees across Europe, inviting comments on its content and on whether sufficient is being done to obtain its potential patient safety benefits.

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