The Nobel Prize in Medicine, Sydney Brenner, speaking on the 1st Forum of Tomorrow Medicine, held last weekend at Albert Einstein Hospital in Sao Paulo, Brazil, dismissed the need to use animal models to study human diseases.

An article of Valor newspaper highlighted: “According to Brenner, it will need to be produced a new generation of clinical scientists who are also the best scientists in basic sciences. They need to be the best, because they will find exceptionally difficult problems, involving more sophisticated organisms that have already been created, such as humans. We won’t need to use animal models for diseases, as we have human models. It is a wonderful time we live in now. We have the resources and talent to give the bigger steps, bigger than the ones we took in the last 60 years. ”

Another participant of the Forum, Daniel Lieberman, director and professor of evolutionary human biology at Harvard University, said: “Our bodies were not designed, they evolved. If we want to know why they are like they are and why we get sick, we have to have evolutionary perspective. Biochemistry, genetics, physiology and anatomy explain the mechanisms of disease, mechanisms by which our bodies work.”

These new concepts that are revolutionizing medical research, directing it to understand the mechanisms that operate in our body at the cellular and molecular level, make unnecessary, of course, the use of animal models in biomedical research.

As Sydney Brenner spoke in his lecture: “All technological progress in recent decades has revolutionized biology. And human biology, in my opinion, will be the basis of biomedical research. ”

This ends with the animal experiments to be applied to human model. Today, scientists have the technology and methods to solve all the problems of the functioning of the human body without the help from any other species.

Dr. Pedro A. Ynterian

President, GAP Project International