Please re-read my original comment. In particular, the 92% bit
> you have to test on a full organism
Are you suggesting testing on humans? Clearly that's the only way to clear those "surprises".
> Organoids just don't have the complexity of living creatures
I think the gist of my argument against animal testing is that animal models aren't very good at predicting outcomes in humans.
Furthermore, there have been some disasterous human clinical trials where drugs have passed all the animal model testing but left many of the human participants dead.
Better than nothing.
>Are you suggesting testing on humans? Clearly that's the only way to clear those "surprises".
No, I'm just saying a full body with multiple organ systems, hormones, and everything else has many more variables than a cell in a petri dish. So a living organism of some sort is a big plus. It's true that if you tested on humans you'd have even fewer unknowns, but that's obviously unethical.
>I think the gist of my argument against animal testing is that animal models aren't very good at predicting outcomes in humans
They aren't perfect. They're just the best thing we have right now
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28955244/
It's an educational process. A lot of folk just go along with the status quo and feel there's no alternative to animal research.
This model checks for one side effect in one organ system. Animal testing can check all organ systems for thousands of side effects.
Clinical trials are expensive. NHP (Non-human primate) studies are also expensive, but orders of magnitude less expensive than human studies. We pharma researchers don't want to put stuff into humans if there's risk of failure, especially if that failure is a tox finding and not just low efficacy.
So we de-risk as much as possible. We go so far as to prove everything on human cells, then buy mice with humanized portions of their genome to test the target in mice that are more like humans in the way we need them to be. Then we test in NHPs, because it's very unsafe to assume that a drug that works and is safe in cells is safe in primates.
In a current project, I'm dealing with the fallout of this exact problem. We did a ton of testing, modeling, in vitro work, rodent work, then we dosed in monkeys and it caused a massive tox signal. We have to go back to the drawing board and explain what happened to the monkeys, how we're going to address it, maybe kill the whole program, and find a new path forward. It passed all of the rigorous pre-monkey testing. And I'm at a major pharma company, where we have pretty specialized teams doing most of this work.
edited to correct an error
They might rather not know.