Rescuing Huntingdon
Executive Summary
Huntingdon Life Sciences Group , Europe's biggest contract research organization using animal testing, has been the target of controversy since 1997, when a technician was caught on film mistreating a dog. Since then, the company has appointed new management and adheres closely to the UK's vigorous laws surrounding animal testing. But protests against it continue, and recently several UK financiers almost withdrew a loan from the company. HLS's problems represent a wider issue surrounding public support and understanding of scientific research in the UK. Much of Britain's public remains skeptical about scientific research, and the intentions of scientists and despite some efforts to form a cohesive statement supporting HLS, Britain's big pharma companies seem reluctant to publicly come to its aid, even some of those that use its services.
You may also be interested in...
Of Mice and Men: Predictive Toxicology
Current in vivo and in vitro models can't keep up with the demand for the safety assessment of large numbers of compounds emerging from high-throughput strategies. Pharmaceutical companies and start-ups are therefore building new systems that they hope will be capable of predicting the toxicity liabilities of new compounds. Cheminformatics can help week out toxic compounds at the lead selection and optimization stage; toxicogenomics may provide a toxicity diagnostic capability at all stages of drug development. For both toxicology approaches, there is not yet enough high quality data to build predictive models. Toxicology-focused cheminformatics programs attempt to consolidate data from hitherto untapped sources; toxicogenomics companies are engaged in the fussy and expensive process of manufacturing data from scratch and validating them with biological experiments.
Biogen Sees Improving Momentum In Slow Leqembi Launch
Sales of the company’s new drugs have a lot of growing to do to make up for older products’ declines, but Biogen highlighted signs of strength for new launches in its Q1 report.
Vivalink Partners With Rett Syndrome Research Trust To Accelerate Research In Rare Disease
Vivalink will provide ECG wearable technology to monitor patients in RSRT’s Vibrant study, which is aimed at assessing autonomic dysfunction in children with Rett syndrome.