Safer Medicines - Latest News

Safety of Medicines Bill and Early Day Motion

Senior Conservative MP David Amess presented the Safety of Medicines Bill to the House of Commons on 20th July. More...

A cross-party group of MPs has also tabled Early Day Motion 475 in support of the Bill.

You can help: please send our postcard to your MP. More...

ASAT Foundation Supports Safer Medicines Initiative

We are delighted that the Dutch Assuring Safety without Animal Testing Foundation has announced its support for our initiative to modernise drug safety testing by conducting a comparison between human biology-based methods and animal tests using a set of drugs known to cause side effects that were not predicted in animals. It is chaired by Dr Bart Sangster, who is also Vice Chair of the Management Board of the European Food Safety Agency. Dr Sangster's illustrious career has included a position as Senior Vice President Safety & Environmental Assurance at Unilever, a professorship in Clinical Toxicology at the University of Utrecht, and posts as Head of the Poison Control Centre at the National Institute for Public Health & the Environment and the Intensive Care Department of the University Hospital Utrecht.

Support from election candidates

We contacted hundreds of new parliamentary candidates in the run-up to the election in order to find out whether they would support the modernisation of drug safety testing. The responses we received were almost unanimously supportive: only Ben Gummer (now MP for Ipswich) did not support our proposal. See all responses here

Thursday 29th April 7pm: interview on Sky Channel 200

Following the highly successful live interview with Safer Medicines Trust's Science Director, Dr Margaret Clotworthy, on 18th March, the programme will be repeated on Thursday, 29th April at 7pm. The interview will be followed by a screening of our film, Safer Medicines. You will be able watch the interview repeat on Sky Channel 200, or at the following link: http://www.justin.tv/edgemediatv

All Early Day Motions are now closed

Very many thanks to everyone who encouraged their MP to sign EDM 29 or EDM 212. All EDMs have now closed with the dissolution of Parliament in preparation for the election on 6th May. 87 MPs signed EDM 29 and 64 signed EDM 212, showing considerable support for both initiatives. It is encouraging that many new parliamentary candidates also support our Safety of Medicines initiative - see here

More information on both EDMs here

Newsletter Spring 2010 available now

Read our latest newsletter here (pdf)

Report on our House of Lords conference published by FRAME

Read the report in the journal Alternatives To Laboratory Animals (ATLA) here

Early Day Motion 212: Access to human tissue for health research

Jo Swinson MP has tabled EDM 212: Access to human tissue for health research, calling on the Government to increase the accessibility of human tissue samples for health research.

This is another very important initiative. Please ask your MP to sign EDM 212, as well as EDM 29.

You can view the signatories here. You can find the name of your MP here.

Early Day Motion 29: Safety of Medicines

Dr Bob Spink MP has re-tabled the Safety of Medicines Early Day Motion in this new parliamentary session as EDM 29. Please write to your own MP to ask them to sign EDM 29: Safety of Medicines – taking the opportunity to thank them if they signed EDM 569 in the last session.

You can view the signatories here. You can find the name of your MP here.

A phenomenal 243 MPs signed Early Day Motion 569: Safety of Medicines:

"That this House believes the safety of medicines should be established by the most reliable methods available in order to reduce the large and increasing toll of serious adverse drug reactions and calls upon the Government to initiate an unprecedented comparison of currently required animal tests with a set of human biology-based tests, as required by the Safety of Medicines (Evaluation) Bill 2009, to see which is the most effective means to predict the safety of medicines for patients."

You can view the signatories here. You can find the name of your MP here.

Very many thanks to everyone who encouraged their MP to sign - you helped to achieve a truly remarkable demonstration of support in favour of such a momentous evaluation: EDM 569 was the joint 10th most-signed of all 2,421 EDMs in the last parliamentary session!

Safer Medicines Trust organised a very successful conference at the House of Lords

On 20th October, Professor the Lord McColl, shadow Spokesperson for Health, hosted a conference entitled:
Human tissues are invaluable for medical research - how can we make them more available?

You can play all the presentations and hear the Radio 4 interviews here

Safer Medicines Campaign article published on Guardian website:

The dead end of animal research
Despite persistent lobbying for animal testing, the evidence shows it is of little use in developing medicines for humans
Kathy Archibald, Director, Safer Medicines Campaign.

You can read the article here

Safer Medicines Trust responds to Home Office consultation on the revision of EU Directive 86/609

The European Commission is updating the 20-year old Directive 86/609 regulating animal experiments. The UK Home Office has just conducted a public consultation on the Commission's proposal. Most of the questions were not relevant for us, as a patient safety organisation, to answer. However, the use of animals as models of human disease and also for testing the safety of medicines has a major impact on patient safety and thus the directive is of concern to us. You can see our submission here.

Leading researcher asks "Why use a rat when a human will do?"

Dr Kelly Berube, a human lung tissue engineering specialist at Cardiff University, was interviewed on the BBC's Today programme on Thursday 4th June prior to speaking at the Cheltenham Science Festival. When asked about the need for continuing research using animal tissue, she responded:

Now we can do our experiments in petri dishes with functional human tissue. Now you have human data, so no need for the rat. I say, why use a rat when a human lung will do? I don’t see any reason why we can’t use human tissue. It’s the best way to go. You get human end point data, you don’t have to worry about saying, well, this happened in the rat, this might happen in man.

To listen to the interview in full, please click here

International regulators sign deal on validating alternatives to animal testing

Our comments published in Regulatory Affairs Journal Pharma here

We are grateful to Regulatory Affairs Journal Pharma for allowing us to reproduce this article on our website.