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Amid a Trump administration-led federal push to eliminate animal testing on food and drugs, an infamous laboratory in Maryland, run by the National Institutes of Health, has been shut down.
This comes after the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced a plan to “phase out” animal testing requirements for monoclonal antibodies and other drug treatments.
“The FDA’s animal testing requirement will be reduced, refined, or potentially replaced using a range of approaches, including AI-based computational models of toxicity and cell lines and organoid toxicity testing in a laboratory setting,” the agency stated.
The laboratory, located in Maryland, faced allegations that it had conducted cruel experiments on beagles, including deliberately infecting at least 2,000 of them with pneumonia, the New York Post reported.
FDA Commissioner Martin A. Makary explained in a statement that the FDA’s pivot away from animal testing and into AI-based test models was long overdue.
“This initiative marks a paradigm shift in drug evaluation and holds promise to accelerate cures and meaningful treatments for Americans while reducing animal use,” he said.
Trump-appointed EPA Administrator, Lee Zeldin, told the Washington Times that he would be reimplementing a first-term Trump policy on phasing out animal testing by 30 percent by the year 2025 and totally phase it out by 2030. An EPA spokesperson told the outlet that this progress was stalled by the Biden administration, but Zeldin was serious about getting the agency back on board with the policy.
“Administrator Zeldin is wholly committed to getting the agency back on track to eliminating animal testing,” the EPA explained.
As reported by RSBN, this is not the first time the NIH has come under fire for allegations of inhumane testing on mammals. In 2020, then-NIH Director Anthony Fauci was accused of paying the University of Georgia to allegedly cruelly infect 28 beagles with biting flies that nearly ate the animals alive, resulting in a three-month experiment and the dogs’ eventual deaths.
On Monday, animal rights group PETA released a statement following NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya’s announcement this week that the agency would finally stop experimenting on beagles – which seems to be a direct reaction to the current administration’s hard push to end unnecessary testing on mammals.
“Since 2013, PETA has argued for the complete termination of these cruel and scientifically worthless experiments on ALL animals—and we will continue to fight until every last one is ended,” said PETA Director of Science Advancement and Outreach Dr. Emily Trunell.
