Animal Testing

Grahame Morris Excerpts

Monday 25th October 2021 Westminster Hall

[Grahame Morris (Easington) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Elliot. I congratulate the hon. Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk (Martyn Day) on opening the debate and on the forceful and cogent argument he put forward to make the case for the petitioners. I also thank good and hon. Members across the House who have spoken so forcefully on this issue. I support petitions 581641 and 590216, signed by more than 320,000 petitioners, quite a number of whom were from my constituency.

I wish to declare an interest as chair of the all-party parliamentary group on human-relevant science. It would be remiss of me not to take the opportunity to pay tribute briefly to the late vice-chair of the group, Sir David Amess. He was an unwavering voice for animals in laboratories and a champion for human-relevant science. He will be remembered as a tireless and principled campaigner for animal welfare. I hope that Members from the Government side, who are absent from tonight’s debate, will step up and take on Sir David’s mantle.

The APPG on human-relevant science is a discussion forum in which politicians, the human-relevant life sciences sector, the third sector, scientists and stakeholders can promote new-approach methodologies that provide unique insights into human biology, transform our ability to understand human disease, and develop new and effective medicines more quickly, without the use of animals.

I certainly take on board the point made earlier that the stats seem to show a slight reduction in the number of animals used in testing in 2020. However, that might be a consequence of the pandemic. In the 10 years up to 2019 the average annual decrease in animal testing was only about 1% a year. On that trajectory, animal testing looks like it is set to continue for another 90 years.

The case for transition to human-relevant science is absolutely compelling. A growing range of cutting-edge techniques provide results that are directly relevant to people and that can replace, or at the very least significantly reduce, the use of animals. Such new-approach method-ologies include the use of human cells, tissues, tissue cultures, artificial intelligence and organ-on-a-chip technology.

Significant differences in the human race’s genetic make-up mean that data from animal experiments cannot be reliably translated into humans. In fact, the current reliance on animal experiments may well be holding back the progress that many patients so urgently need. More than 92% of drugs that show promise in animal tests fail to reach the clinic and do not benefit patients, mostly for reasons of poor efficacy and safety that were not predicted by animal testing. In disease research, the picture is similar. Decades of efforts towards understanding neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease, and towards finding effective therapies for them, have been huge failures due to the majority of animal experiments lacking human relevance.

The APPG on human-relevant science has held several meetings by Zoom over the past year, examining two main areas: funding barriers and regulatory barriers. As it stands, the funding made available for research via the National Centre for the Replacement, Refinement and Reduction of Animals in Research—the NC3Rs that the hon. Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk referred to—is not sufficient to support the transition to human-relevant research. Indeed, the NC3Rs’s annual budget amounts to only around £10 million. By comparison, the Association of Medical Research Charities estimates that the Medical Research Council and the National Institute for Health Research provided a combined total of £1.8 billion in funding for UK medical research in 2019, while medical research charities provided £1.9 billion.

The economic potential of animal-free methods is huge. By providing results that are directly relevant to people, new-approach methodologies can accelerate the development of effective treatments that will transform patients’ lives and reduce the economic cost of ill health. I hope the Minister will respond to the important point raised earlier that over 450 skin sensation tests were carried out on mice in 2020, even though validated non-animal tests were and are available. In 2020, not a single application for licences to conduct experiments on animals were refused permission.

There is major public support for replacing animal testing with human-relevant techniques, and the petitions that formed the basis for today’s debate attest to that. A YouGov poll also shows enormous public support. The Government must take decisive and ambitious action to phase out animal experiments and phase in the use of cutting-edge, human-relevant techniques. Modernising medical research in this way will deliver major benefits for people, animals and the UK economy.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (George Freeman)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship in my fifth week in office, Ms Elliott. I am hugely grateful to the hon. Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk (Martyn Day) and other colleagues for raising these important issues today, not least in the week in which the comprehensive spending review will be settled. I will then have a chance to look at the overall allocation of funding within the ecosystem for which I am responsible as Minister for Science, Research and Innovation.

I reassure colleagues, and those in the Public Gallery and elsewhere, that I take this issue very seriously, and I will explain my background in the sector.

I echo the comments made by a number of Opposition colleagues: if we are to provide a legacy for Sir David Amess, we ought to come together on this issue. I welcome the tone of everybody’s contributions, in particular that of the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Newport West (Ruth Jones), which highlights the lack of partisan politics in this matter and the need to seek cross-party consensus. I welcome her reference to this Government’s 2015 ban on cosmetics tested on animals and the 1997 Labour Government’s ban. This country has taken and will continue to take the matter seriously, and we should be proud of that.

I was asked about 36 questions, which I will try to cover, but I want to flag in particular the important opening points made by the hon. Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk, who spoke about the moral and legal considerations at the heart of the issue—he is right: this is not just a utilitarian argument, but a moral and legal issue about the values that we hold as a country—and about the importance of recognising that sentience confers an additional responsibility, which is enshrined in legislation but merits saying. Our obligations to mammals, for example, are much greater than our obligations to insects. That might be controversial in some places in this country, but I think that in this Chamber, people will understand the difference. I think that was an important and well-made point.

The number of signatories to the petitions indicates the strength of the public view on the matter. I sincerely thank all hon. Members for the quality of their contributions. I suspect the reason that there are not more colleagues on the Government Benches is that the main Chamber is currently debating the Second Reading of the Animal Welfare (Kept Animals) Bill, and while hon. Members have been speaking in this debate, I have been watching Conservative Members speaking in that one. It is fair to say that there is strong cross-party support for getting the framework for animal research right.

I thank and pay particular tribute to those who have spoken, including the hon. Member for Putney (Fleur Anderson), who raised the issue of values and the important role of companies such as the Body Shop and campaigns such as PETA—I echo those considerations. Transparency for consumers when purchasing goods is quite an important factor in driving the culture change that we need to see, and I support her on that point. She, like other Members, mentioned the importance of technology and the human-on-a-chip and organ-on-a-chip technologies that may hold the opportunity for us to completely liberate ourselves from reliance on animals.

The hon. Member for Stockport (Navendu Mishra) raised the important issue of force-feeding and factory farming. I think the whole House would like to move away from any reliance on factory farming, but while there is such a reliance, it is important that that activity is carried out to the highest standards and that public trust is supported by sufficient accountability.

The hon. Member for Rutherglen and Hamilton West (Margaret Ferrier) raised an interesting point about why no applications are turned down, which I will come to. The hon. Member for Slough (Mr Dhesi) mentioned the importance of complex cell models and highlighted the need for us to review the workings of the legislation. The hon. Member for Easington (Grahame Morris) highlighted quite powerfully the big difference between the amount of money—around £3 billion—spent on broader life science and medical-related research compared with the £100 million, or £10 million a year, spent on this issue. He made an important point about ensuring that the matter gets enough attention.

[Grahame Morris]

The Minister is being very thorough on some of those points. We are not, as he alluded to in his opening remarks and again just now, arguing for the outcome of the comprehensive spending review to be huge additional resource. It is about skewing the huge sums of money that are available towards this particular area. That would be more efficacious and beneficial for everyone concerned.

[George Freeman]

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point. I was about to say that the National Institute for Health Research—for which I was responsible in my previous ministerial role but one, as Minister for life sciences—puts about £1 billion a year into research on the practice of health. I will happily raise the issue with the relevant Minister at the Department for Health and Social Care, because quite important part of the NIHR’s remit is to build confidence in health research.

The hon. Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Patricia Gibson) raised the important issue of accountability on the rate of progress, and the opportunities arising from the UK’s departure from the EU. I will try to come to all those issues in due course, and if for any reason I miss any, I will happily write to Members with the answer that I would have given had I had time.

I am personally passionate about this agenda for a whole raft of reasons, not just because I have a much beloved cat and dog as pets. Like everyone in the Chamber, and I think most people in this House, I feel very strongly that we have a duty of care as human beings to the animals around us. Also, having had a career in medical research before coming to Parliament in 2010, I have seen for myself the importance both of using every piece of technology to try to remove dependence on animals in the development of medicines and of carrying public trust in the research process with us.

As hon. Members have set out, in the life science sector a quiet revolution is going on, in which the traditional model of drug discovery—which typically takes 15 years and $2 billion, and has an 80% failure rate—is being quietly transformed by revolutions in genomics and informatics, allowing us to move from a paradigm in which the industry would typically try to develop one drug that suits all through a long and complex cycle of theoretical drug discovery targeting, in silico chemistry, then through into in vitro models, animal trials, human trials, and marketing and National Institute for Health and Care Excellence approval.

The revolution in genomics and informatics allows us to begin to target patient groups, develop drugs around particular blood types, genotypes and phenotypes, and cut out a lot of the long, traditional drug discovery process. It is a revolution that I am passionate about, not just because it will in due course reduce, and possibly even eradicate, the need for us to rely on often unreliable animal models. Members will have heard me talk in other places about the need to move away from necessary but imperfect models of human disease.

[George Freeman]

I understand the hon. Member’s point and I will come to it. I could not quite agree that our reliance at the moment on animal testing is of no use at all; it is of important use in defining certain elements of toxicity and safety. It is not perfect, but to say that it has no use is not fair. I will come to his point about how quickly we need to make progress.

Part of my passion for this is that I tried to found a company developing toxicology artificial intelligence—predictive software that would predict the toxicology of compounds so that we do not have to rely on animal models. I care sufficiently about it that I took the trouble to do that. Let me share with colleagues one thing that I discovered in that process, which speaks to the delicacy sometimes around transparency. Passions in this sector understandably run very high. I know that colleagues will be shocked to discover that, in the course of putting together a company to develop toxicology software, one needs to be able to understand the experiments that are currently being done in order to model them better using software. That meant that on the board of the company we had somebody from Huntingdon Life Sciences so that we could understand the processes that we were having to replace.

The presence of that person on the board was alone sufficient to attract huge and violent attacks from Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty. Of course, who on the board did they pick on? Was it any of the eight men, of whom I was one? No. They picked on the company secretary—the member of the board least responsible for the company. She lived alone in a cottage in the fens, and woke in the middle of the night to find 20 people in balaclavas daubing her house with red paint, calling her a bunny killer. I flag that story because it speaks to the passions and the need for a balanced approach, in the way that colleagues have raised the issue today.

If we are to be transparent and accountable, we need to ensure that that transparency and accountability can be shared, and that we are not putting particular people at risk. However, I share the point that we need to do everything we can to ensure that the quiet revolution accelerates, and that we reduce the reliance on animals for research as fast as we possibly can and to as great an extent as we can.

Allow me to describe briefly the framework that we have in place. Why is the use of animals in scientific research justified at all? It is justified because, at the moment, it is vital for identifying benefits to humans, animals and the environment. We have to try to balance that dependence with our commitment to the highest animal welfare standards. That is the basis on which the current law is drafted. The balance between those two elements is reflected in the fact that we have a dedicated Act to make sure that animal welfare and animal research are properly integrated. The responsibility for managing that Act lies with the Home Office and the Home Secretary, not with me, but I will raise the issues mentioned today with the Home Office.

The Act specifies that animals can be used in science only for specific limited purposes where there are no alternatives—a crucial point—and provides protection for those animals through the requirement for application of the three Rs: replacement, reduction and refinement. Today’s debate raised three related but separate issues that contribute to the Government's overall strategic direction and policy: first, the benefits derived from the use of animals in science where there are, as yet, no alternatives; secondly, the regulatory regime that facilitates such use; and thirdly, our support and commitment to the funding of the three Rs in order to accelerate progress away from reliance.

Let me take each in turn. At the moment, animal testing research plays a vital role in understanding how biological systems work in health and disease. It is crucial to our understanding of new medicines and cutting-edge medical technologies for both humans and animal health, and it supports the safety and sustainability of our environment by helping to reduce dependency on chemicals. Animal research has helped us to make life-changing discoveries for new vaccines and medicines, transplant procedures, anaesthetics and blood transfusions —not least the development of the covid-19 vaccine, which was made possible because of animal research.

While I accept that we need to try to move away as quickly as possible, one must remember that we are using animals only because it is the way we have evolved towards minimising exposure of human beings to dangerous drugs. I assure hon. Members that if we were to completely remove all animal use from medicines research, we would expose our own kith and kin to much higher risks. That would quickly be seen as irresponsible.

We need to find a way of substituting those pre-human tests as quickly as possible. Although much research can be done into non-animal models, there are still purposes for which, sadly, it is essential to use live animals, as the complexity of whole biological mammalian systems cannot always be replicated using validated non-animal methodologies. That is especially the case where human medicines are developed.

[Grahame Morris]

The Minister is being generous, and he will want to make progress. An example of a drug that went through extensive animal testing through the established processes is thalidomide. Animal testing is not infallible. We have discovered subsequently that some drugs that have been through established animal testing can be repurposed. We have now discovered that it is an extremely effective drug against leprosy and other conditions. There is rightfully scepticism about statements that animal testing will ensure that drugs are completely safe, because that is not the case.