New Jersey - Digital Publishing

The scientifi c community shares the goals of reducing
or replacing the use of laboratory animals for testing.
BIOMED
> Continued from page 5
tionally, with an initial focus on China.
Mackta returned to NJABR last year,
stepping back into an issue she believes
opponents of animal research have slowly
been winning.
“It was welcome news when we heard
Jayne was going to be back at it,” said
Debbie Hart, the president of biotech
trade group BioNJ and a longtime associate
of Mackta’s. “She seems to have hit the
ground running with as much passion as
she’s ever had in her career.”
Karl Field, chairman of NJABR’s board
and the executive director of veterinary sciences
at Bristol-Myers Squibb, said Mackta
has brought a renewed focus to the organization
and a keen understanding of the association’s
strengths and weaknesses.
He said that’s more important than
ever as the association deals with limited
fi nancial resources and the continued
threat of legislation that could directly or
indirectly affect research.
“NJABR traditionally has taken any
good idea and turned it into a program or
service or a product for its membership or
for the state, but we can’t continue to do
that,” he said. “We really have to look at
what are the most important things out
there affecting our ability to do biomedical
research, and (then) address them.”
Much of the challenge, Mackta said, is
framing the debate.
For instance, animal research is allowed
in New Jersey under an exemption
to the state’s “animal cruelty” law. Mackta
said she’s glad for the exemption, but not
for the terminology.
“If you can defi ne cruelty,” Mackta
said, “you have won the game.”
In fact, the industry does have extensive
— and costly — care guidelines for the
use of animals in research. The industry
has its own guidebook and accreditation
system, and the federal government requires
institutions that use animals in research
to set up committees to oversee and
evaluate the care and use of the animals.
There’s also a growing fi eld of veterinary
science specifi cally geared toward caring
for laboratory animals.
Those standards were one reason
Mackta’s work in China was a challenge,
she said. “It’s very hard to make the case
that you need to provide pure and specifi c
kinds of feed, and that the caging has to
be a certain size, and the care has to be
very intense and very expensive,” she said.
“The people who are in charge of caring
for these animals are probably not making
that amount of money in a month.”
Mackta also said animal research is a
small part of biomedical research, and that
the number of animals used in research
pales in comparison to the number of animals
eaten as food, for instance. According
to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the
total number of animals used in research
in the United States in 2009 was 979,000;
about 59,000 of those animals were in
New Jersey. But Dave Sacks, a department
spokesman, said those fi gures do not include
mice, rats and birds — which make
up a majority of animals used in labs — as
the care of those animals is not covered by
the federal Animal Welfare Act.
Still, Mackta doesn’t hang her hat
on statistics. “Numbers are so easily manipulated
to give you the information that
you’re looking for,” she said.
Instead, she talks about science, arguing
both that animal testing is the best option
in many cases, and that the scientifi c
community shares the goals of reducing or
replacing the use of laboratory animals.
“It’s good science to always be looking
for new ways to do things, to refi ne
your techniques to have the best model,”
she said.
In the meantime, her goal is to educate
policymakers on the importance
of animal research, and to convince the
pharmaceutical industry itself of the importance
of defending their right to conduct
that research, even as the industry
continues to shrink.
“We have to fi nd the winning strategies,”
she said. “I don’t know what they are,
but I do believe that if we don’t make the
case in a compelling way, so people connect
the dots and understand the implications
… we’re going to then one day wake up and
go, ‘What happened? Where did it go?’ And
then it’s going to be too late.”
E-mail to: jkaltwasser@njbiz.com
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