• Question: when you are testing the vaccines what animals do you test them on and why?

    Asked by lilbowen to Ruth, PB, Katy, Lyn, Paul on 14 Jun 2013. This question was also asked by flash18.
    • Photo: Peter Balfe

      Peter Balfe answered on 14 Jun 2013:

      Healthy human volunteers are the study animal of choice for most vaccines.

      Relatively few human vaccines are extensively tested on animals (because they rarely work the same way).

    • Photo: Katy Brown

      Katy Brown answered on 14 Jun 2013:

      I don’t work with vaccines or animals myself, but most research which uses animals is carried out on mice, especially at the early stages before it is safe to use in humans. There are lots of reasons for this. Mice are mammals, like humans, so their bodies have a lot of similarities to ours. You can buy mice which have a known medical and genetic history, which makes the research easier and more accurate. Because mice are small and live a relatively short time they are practical to use in the lab – you can keep a lot of mice comfortable without much space and you can study a mouse from birth to adulthood in a short amount of time.

    • Photo: Ruth Mitchell

      Ruth Mitchell answered on 17 Jun 2013:

      I don’t work on vaccines. But like Paul and Katy have said: the best animals would be humans. Researchers usually use mice but there are other animals such as primates and rats. It depends actually what your question is as to which one to use. Alot of it comes down to how far along in the development of the vaccine you are, if at initial stages you just want something cheap but then at later stages you would definitely want it tested on humans before letting doctors hand it out.

    • Photo: Ee Lyn Lim

      Ee Lyn Lim answered on 22 Jun 2013:

      I’m only working on tumour vaccines (which is a vaccine for cancer – it works kind of differently from regular vaccines…), but I test them in mice. The real reason why I’m using mice is because I also work on a genetic mutation, and mice are the best mammals to use for making changes in the DNA. I also study my vaccine in mice because then I can study both things together, and how they affect each other.

    • Photo: Paul Waines

      Paul Waines answered on 27 Jun 2013:

      Hi lilbowen-

      I dont test vaccines on animals myself , but I know people that do. The animals health is always a priority, and the government makes sure that that is the case. As soon as possible humans are used, as they are really the best test animals for scientists, but some work on animals beforehand is inevitable!

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