The Food and Drug Administration unveiled a new study Friday designed to lead to fewer dogs used in later trials for veterinary medicine.
And, all the dogs in the study will be adopted out as pets at its end.
“In short, our goal is to do one single study involving a small number of dogs — where the dogs will only be subject to minimally invasive blood sampling, and adopted as pets at the completion of the short trial — to eliminate the need for the use of dogs in certain types of future studies, some where they might have been euthanized,” FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said in a statement Friday.
The single study will help researchers replace the canine test subjects with new informatics tools that will model how drugs are absorbed in dogs’ blood rather than testing them on live dogs.
The study will employ “bioequivalence” trials that compare pharmaceutical products already approved to a proposed generic version to determine whether the drugs are equally safe and effective. Such drug tests commonly euthanize dogs so that their bodies can undergo a necropsy to evaluate the impact of the medicine on the dogs’ bodies.
But the new study intends to use the data gathered to “validate a research model” that would “establish a clear benchmark for how these drugs are absorbed in the dogs’ blood.”
Gottlieb said the 27 dogs that will participate in the study will receive proper medical attention “so that they remain happy, well-socialized, and healthy.”
