The main focus of the new study is with drug trial involving animals, designed to test out the efficacy and safety of new medicinal products. The research has found many studies are poorly designed, so that they do not really prove what they set out to do. Moreover, many of the studies are a waste of time, money and cause unnecessary animal suffering.
Many animal trials are run on drug molecules once scientists have decided the molecules will stand a good chance of working. If animal trials prove to be successful, then recommendations are made to test out the drugs on people in final phase clinical trials.
The new study has been led by Edinburgh University. Here researchers reviewed scores of global studies, considering the design and outcome. According to The Guardian, a range of studies reviewed by the distinguished neurologist Malcolm Macleod found many journals end up publishing poorly designed animal studies. Close to home, he also found that around two-thirds of animal work from British universities was questionable and, in some cases, invalid.
The key criticism leveled against the animal trials was that researchers had not completed basic steps to prevent biases from skewing their results. Mistakes included not including enough animals for the results to be statistically sound and failing to mention when rogue animals had been removed from a study. Another common failing was not randomly assigning animals to control groups (where one group receives the test drug and the other a placebo.)
The outcome of the review is published in the journal PLOS Biology, in a paper headed “Risk of Bias in Reports of In Vivo Research: A Focus for Improvement.”
