The U.S. Food and Drug Administration will no longer require all new drugs to be tested on animals. The dogs and mice thank you!
This comes from the FDA Modernization Act 2.0 that was passed through the omnibus bill in late December. It was sponsored by Senator Rand Paul, a physician himself, and it had bipartisan support.
Prior to this bill, all drugs were required to undergo animal studies before human studies. Now drug companies can still choose to conduct animal trials but they do not have to.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that new drugs will be tested on humans first. There are other technologies available to them such as human biology-based test methods and cell-based methods.
