Poor Translatability of Biomedical Research Using Animals — A Narrative Review

The failure rate for the translation of drugs from animal testing to human treatments remains at over 92%, where it has been for the past few decades. The majority of these failures are due to unexpected toxicity — that is, safety issues revealed in human trials that were not apparent in animal tests — or lack of efficacy. However, the use of more innovative tools, such as organs-on-chips, in the preclinical pipeline for drug testing, has revealed that these tools are more able to predict unexpected safety events prior to clinical trials and so can be used for this, as well as for efficacy testing. Here, we review several disease areas, and consider how the use of animal models has failed to offer effective new treatments. We also make some suggestions as to how the more human-relevant new approach methodologies might be applied to address this.