Americans For Medical Advancement (AFMA) is a not-for-profit organization that promotes biomedical research and the practice of medicine based on critical thinking and our current understanding of evolutionary and developmental biology, complex systems and genomics.
Our primary concern is the advancement of investigative methodologies that lead to effective cures and treatments for human diseases. As such, AFMA is opposed to research modalities that have been shown to be scientifically invalid—specifically, the use of animals as predictive models (also known as causal analogical models) for humans relative to drug and disease response.
While an immense body of empirical evidence has supported this conclusion for decades, new knowledge about genes, gene regulation, gene expression and gene networks—gained in large part as a result of the Human Genome Project—has significantly increased our understanding of why animals cannot be used to predict human response to drugs or the pathophysiology of human diseases.
Despite the development of an all-encompassing theory as to why animals are not predictive, there remains—much to the detriment of human health and medical progress—extraordinary resistance to abandoning the use of animals as predictive models. (For the reasons why, click on OPPOSITION)
The goal of AFMA, therefore, is to educate the scientific community, as well as the general public, of the urgent need for a move away from the ineffective animal model to research modalities that truly reflect the enormous strides we have made in our knowledge of living systems.
Drs Shanks, Greek, and Greek have published an article “Are animal models predictive for humans?” in the journal Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine. The article can be freely accessed at
www.peh-med.com/content/pdf/1747-5341-4-2.pdf or via the Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine homepage (www.peh-med.com/home/).
