The British National Institute for Clinical Excellence recently issued guidelines for a combination chemotherapy regimen to treat lung Cancer, and also recommend that patients who don’t respond well to other forms of chemotherapy be administered docetaxel, which is marketed under the brand name Taxotere. Taxotere is interesting because some animal rights groups hold it up as a model of what can be accomplished with human cell cultures rather than animal models, but such claims tend to omit some important facts.
Take a look at the Australian web site, AnimalLiberation.Org.Au. Like most animal rights sites, it maintains that testing drugs with animal models is cruel and ineffective: “Apart from being cruel to animals, this approach is also not effective. Different species respond in different ways to drugs.”
It gives several examples of how cell cultures have led to breakthroughs in cancer research, including Taxotere: “…breast cancers removed during operations were tested with 4 different drugs to find the most effective. The drug Taxotere most effectively killed cancer cells.”
Ironically, however, research on Taxotere demonstrates the problem with claims that animals and humans are too different. After Taxotere was shown to kill breast cancer cells in vitro, numerous follow-up studies were conducted to see if the drug could destroy a breast cancer tumor in a whole organism — specifically in Mice. Sure enough, the drug performed very well in such models, and numerous animal testing has been done with combining Taxotere and other drugs to try to find a cure for breast cancer (some with very promising results).
Source:
Lung cancer drugs approved. The BBC, June 12, 2001.