Texas A&M’s research using dogs is cruel and it isn’t helping to cure muscular dystrophy – The Dallas Morning News

Thephotos and videos of drooling and crippled golden retrievers in cages at Texas A&M University are heartbreaking. The dogs have been bred to be part of a studyof Duchenne muscular dystrophy,and then they are killed. Their short, miserable lives are supposedly the price of progress toward halting, slowing or reversing the awful consequences of this fatal neuromuscular disease.

Except no. Though this line of investigation has been pursued by many researchers for nearly four decades, there is no answer for those afflicted with DMD. Only one drug (Exondys 51) is approved to treat the disease, and a review by a Boston-based nonprofit watchdog group showed it doesn't work. A second drug from the same company (Vyondys 53) wasrecently rejectedby the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Sarepta Therapeutics, the company that developed these drugs,as of August had not even begun the required clinical trialmandated after the FDA approved Exondys 51 in 2016 without concrete evidence of usefulness. Sarepta took advantage of the FDA's accelerated approval program but reneged on its responsibility to prove that the drug works. Yet Sarepta has collected hundreds of millions of dollars from desperate patients and families.

That's all there is to show for decades of lost time, hundreds of millions of wasted dollars, dashed hopes for DMD families, and piles of dead dogs. Yet the claims of necessity and promises of advances just around the corner persist against all evidence.

The disease in the research animals is not even the same as the human disease, though some symptoms are the same.

The university has lied about the origins of the animals, claiming that they have a naturally occurring disease when in fact they are being bred to express symptoms of drooling, muscle failure, inability to eat and finally death. TAMU research leaders claim in a recentDallas Morning Newsarticle that "These animals are loved from the minute they enter this world to the minute they leave it." That this could be said about companion animals who will suffer and die for no human benefit would be laughable if it were not so tragic.

The leader of the canine DMD research lab, Joseph Kornegay, retired in June, and the breeding program has stopped, though the research has not. TAMU still defends this failed research with claims that this is where the answers lie for DMD. The death of these dogs, a species that is a family member for so many of us, is a badge of shame for A&M.

The argument is made that the promises to patients and their families can only be met by continuing this research. Let me turn that around. What about the ethics of depriving the public of successful treatments due to the stubborn adherence to decades of failure? The cost is not only lost time, lost moneyand tortured companion animals. It is lost hope.

No matter how you feel about the ethics of research involving animals, surely in this trade, everyone loses.

John J. Pippin is director of academic affairs for Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. He wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News.

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Texas A&M's research using dogs is cruel and it isn't helping to cure muscular dystrophy - The Dallas Morning News