Investigator bonds with monkeys in lab

Our undercover investigator was employed at Inotiv, an animal testing laboratory in Indiana, from August 2021 to March 2022. While there, she developed a unique relationship with two very playful primates, Ziggy and Chloe. See their endearing and heartbreaking story. And help us put an end to cruel animal testing methods. You can help animals like Ziggy and Chloe—please take a moment to contact the FDA and urge them to stop relying on outdated animal testing and instead commit to and prioritize a shift towards more accurate non-animal test methods. We revealed the results of an approximately seven-month undercover investigation at Inotiv, an animal testing laboratory in Indiana where thousands of animals, including dogs, primates, pigs, mice and rats are killed every year. The investigation reveals the suffering and death of these animals for toxicity testing of drugs. From August 2021 to March 2022, an undercover investigator was employed at the facility and assigned to work on more than 70 toxicity studies commissioned by over two dozen pharmaceutical companies involving more than 6,000 animals. The animals spent their days behind bars and were subjected to painful procedures such as force-feeding substances via stomach tubes, injections and multiple blood draws. Young primates were often held in restraint chairs for long periods of time during these procedures. Most of the animals were killed at the end of the studies, as is typical for any drug testing. Close to 90% of drugs tested on animals ultimately fail in human trials, with approximately half of those failures due to unanticipated human toxicity, despite no toxicity having been observed in animals. An example unfolded during the investigation when Aligos Therapeutics ended pursuit of a drug being tested on mice and primates at Inotiv while the HSUS investigator was there. The biopharmaceutical company halted the tests because of unexpected toxicity in a human clinical trial. One person was hospitalized, and three others suffered from adverse effects. There is evidence that non-animal approaches, such as organ-chip technologies, artificial intelligence, 3D printing and various other approaches, alone or in combination, provide superior results that will ultimately improve drug success rates for humans while sparing animals. The largest organ-chip study conducted to date demonstrated that liver chips detected toxicity in almost seven out of every eight drugs that proved toxic in human patients even after animal tests did not reveal that the drugs were toxic in the animal models.