New proposed European laws to harmonize animal research across the EU could seriously hamper biomedical research, according a report published yesterday (Mar. 24) by the European Science Foundation (ESF) and a declaration issued today (Mar. 25) by a group of leading British life sciences organizations.

Image: Understanding Animal Research/ Wellcome Images

"We certainly welcome the opportunity to standardize animal care on a Europe-wide basis," Roger Lemon, a neuroscientist at University College London and the chair of the ESF's expert group on animal research, told The Scientist. "But where we have some difficulty is where some types of research would just be stopped altogether."

Last November, the European Commission and European Parliament introduced draft legislation -- called the "Directive on the Protection of Animals Used for Scientific Purposes" -- to update prior legislation from 1986. The proposed directive aims to reduce the number of animals used in research and to set standard guidelines for animal breeding, accommodation, and care across all 27 European member states.

The ESF's expert group felt that the directive's blanket laws don't necessarily achieve its stated goals, however. Rather than benefiting the well-being of animal subjects, the new rules would "simply make the conditions of animal research more bureaucratic and expensive without achieving any significant change in animal welfare," said Lemon. For example, the directive proposes a minimum cage size for lab mice, but research shows that mice often feel threatened by larger open spaces, Lemon said.

Nine UK bioscience organizations representing academia, industry, animal carers, research funders, and patient groups sent a "declaration of concern" to European officials today including detailed comments on hundreds of proposed measures in the directive. "We are concerned that some of the amendments as currently drafted will bring no animal welfare benefits, and paradoxically could lead to an increased number of animals used," Mark Walport, director of the Wellcome Trust and one of the declaration's signatories, said in a statement.

The ESF's expert group proposed their own suite of new amendments to the directive that it hopes will provide "a better defined and more balanced approach" to animal welfare issues and biomedical research. Both the ESF's and the British group's proposals will be part of some 400 amendments that will be voted on next week (Mar. 31) by the EU's Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development, which manages the directive.

Under the proposal, the use of non-human primates would be subject to stringent restrictions and research involving great apes would be banned. Lemon, who studies hand and finger motor control in rhesus monkeys, said that most basic research -- including his own -- would be halted and only research that can show direct, short-term benefits for treating human disease would be permitted. "There appears to be a lot of issues that would make a lot of research impossible, and it would basically stop it overnight," he said. "It's a very poor piece of legislation that needs a huge amount of work on it."


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