Are researchers moving away from animal models as a result of poor clinical translation in the field of stroke? An analysis of opinion papers

What is it about?

Despite decades of research using animals to develop drug treatments for stroke, there are few options available for people who have a stroke. The vast majority of treatments found to be successful in animal studies have turned out to be ineffective or harmful in humans. Given this situation, our study sets out to explore whether researchers are moving away from using animals to develop drugs for stroke, and whether they are interested in trying out new approaches.
We searched for papers written by scientists working in the field that expressed their opinions about the failure of animal studies to develop effective drugs for stroke. We found 80 papers, published between 1979 and 2018. All the authors of these papers agreed that there was a crisis in stroke research, but most did not feel that this was due to the use of animal studies. Some, however, did point to the differences between animals and humans, suggesting this might be a problem. Most of the solutions that the authors proposed involved improving animal studies. A minority, however, suggested that matters might be improved if non-animal methods (that focused more on human biology) were used alongside animal studies. One author suggested using human based research instead of animal studies.
Our study shows that although researchers working in the field agree that animal studies have failed to produce treatments for stroke patients, they are still reluctant to stop using animal studies. At the same time, however, there seems to be a move in the direction of trying out new, non-animal approaches. We suggest that this should be encouraged, for the sake of stroke patients.


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