Grant: Doctoral: Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarships

Supervisors: Dean Fergusson, Manoj Lalu, University of Ottawa Testing new disease treatments in humans is very slow (taking up to 10-20 years) and expensive (hundreds of millions of dollars). Testing in animals can be done more efficiently, for less money, allowing us to test many more treatments than possible in humans alone. Although testing new treatments in animals can be a good way to save time, money, and try as many types of treatments as possible, very few treatments that seem effective in animals end up working well in humans. This is partially because there is no agreement on how we should do our animal testing, or judge if a treatment that works in animals has a good chance of also working in humans. If we could reach an agreement on the most important details to consider when testing new treatments in animals, then this might help us improve both the way we test treatments and how to choose the best treatments to try in humans. We will try to reach agreement among international experts on what details need to be considered in designing, conducting, and analyzing animal studies to give the best chance that a treatment might also work in humans. First, we will search for any existing rules or suggestions from government agencies and scientific leaders. Second, we will combine these rules into a list and study the evidence for why each list item is important to include. Third, we will form a group of patients, animal and human researchers, and members of agencies from around the world that deal with approval of new disease treatments, to give their own suggestions. As a group, we will come to a global agreement on important study design details for how to test disease treatments in animals to better ensure the treatment might work in humans. We will then try to encourage others to use this global agreement to make their animal testing as useful as possible and to help others choose which treatments should move forward to be tested in humans.