Wasteful animal testing
Despite the use of over 115 million animals in experiments globally each year, on average only 25 new medicines are approved annually by the leading drug regulator, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Many of these are for rare diseases.
The US drug industry invests $50 billion per year in research, but the approval rate of new drugs is the same as it was 50 years ago.
Only 6% of 4,300 international companies involved in drug development have registered a new drug with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration since 1950.
Even those drugs that are approved are not universally effective due to individual reactions - the top ten highest-grossing drugs in the USA only help between 1 in 4 and 1 in 25 people who take them
Of over 1,000 potential stroke treatments that had been ‘successful’ in animal tests, only approximately 10% progressed to human trials. None worked sufficiently well in humans.
A review of 101 high impact basic science discoveries based on animal experiments found that only 5% resulted in approved treatments within 20 years.