Chunk #12 — Problems of Successful Translation to Humans of Data from Animal Experimentation — The Discordance between Human Diseases and Animal Models of Diseases
The high clinical failure rate in drug development across all disease categories is based, at least in part, on the inability to adequately model human diseases in animals and the poor predictability of animal models.36 A notable systematic review, published in 2007, compared animal experimentation results with clinical trial findings across interventions aimed at the treatment of head injury, respiratory distress syndrome, osteoporosis, stroke, and hemorrhage.37 The study found that the human and animal results were in accordance only half of the time. In other words, the animal experiments were no more likely than a flip of the coin to predict whether those interventions would benefit humans.
