Support PETA’s Research Modernization Deal

Experiments on animals are cruel and unethical, but did you know that they don’t even lead to treatments and cures for humans?

Studies show that a 90% of basic research, most of which involves animals, fails to lead to treatments for humans. Yet the biggest funder of research in the U.S., the National Institutes of Health (NIH), spends nearly half its annual budget on animal studies.

That was $23 billion wasted in 2023 while animals are being killed and humans are dying.

We need a better way—and PETA scientists have come up with it. The Research Modernization Deal is a roadmap and strategy for optimizing investments in research to cure disease—by ending funding for strategies that don’t work (i.e., experiments on animals) and investing in research that’s relevant to humans. In 2021, after PETA entities presented the Research Modernization Deal to members of the European Parliament, that body passed (almost unanimously) a resolution calling on the European Commission to create an action plan to end all experiments on animals.

The Current System Is Broken

• Ninety-five percent of all new drugs that test safe and effective in animal tests fail or cause harm in human clinical trials.
• The failure rate of new drugs developed using animals in specific disease research areas exceeds 95%. Here are a few examples:
  • HIV vaccine—100%
  • Strokes—100% (based on 1,000 new agents tested in animals in 100 clinical trials)
  • Alzheimer’s disease—99.6%
  • Cancer—96.6%
• Eighty-nine percent of preclinical studies, which are largely experiments on animals, can’t be reproduced, even though reproducibility is a critical component of scientific research.

About 5.8 million Americans live with Alzheimer’s disease. But treatments that have appeared promising in mice simply haven’t worked in humans. The U.S. is expected to spend $1.1 trillion on research for Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia by 2050—but if we stick to our current path, most of that money will be wasted on cruel and pointless animal experiments. No cure for humans is in sight.

Reliance on animal models is diverting funds from more promising areas of research and delaying the development of effective drugs and treatments.

What’s the Research Modernization Deal About?
PETA’s Research Modernization Deal maps out a strategy for replacing the use of animals in experiments with human-relevant methods. It includes the following:

• Eliminating the use of animals immediately in areas where they’ve already been shown to be poor surrogates for humans
• Critically reviewing additional areas of research to determine where animal use can be phased out
• Introducing an ethical cost-benefit analysis system into U.S. policies governing the use of animals in biomedical research
• Promoting the international harmonization and acceptance of non-animal testing methods among government agencies and research bodies
• Redirecting funds from animal experiments to the development of non-animal methods

 

SEE THE RESEARCH MODERNIZATION DEAL IN FULL

 

Take Action!
We need all lawmakers to understand how much money NIH currently wastes. Please send a polite e-mail to your members of Congress urging them to mandate that NIH stop throwing away taxpayer money on cruel, useless animal experiments and instead focus on modern, non-animal research methods.

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