Have you seen our latest commercial? None other than former lab dog Lola takes the lead role. She symbolizes the 450,000 laboratory animals that undergo painful experiments every year in the Netherlands. Fortunately, Lola has found her forever home with Mascha, but sadly, this is not the case for every lab animal. The vast majority of animals do not survive the experiments they have to endure. That’s why this commercial is a cry for help: stop unnecessary animal suffering.
Watch the commercial on YouTube (Dutch)
Animal testing: it should and can be different
9 out of 10 drugs tested on animals and found to be safe, end up not working at all for humans. And yet nearly half a million laboratory animals continue to suffer from experiments for our health every year. It should and can be different, as researcher Abdoel El Ghalbzouri, who appears in the commercial, also believes. At Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC), he works with animal-free skin models to study skin cancer, a field traditionally reliant on animal testing. Abdoel shows that there is an alternative:
“In my current research, I use a tumor that has been removed from a patient and donated for study. We can keep this tumor alive in the laboratory and conduct research with it. Or we can isolate all cell types from this tumor, cultivate them, and build a 3D skin cancer model that mimics skin cancer. We then conduct research on this model.”
– dr. Abdoel El Ghalbzouri
Together with researchers like Abdoel, we are working on alternatives so that research without animal testing becomes the norm.
