Hello.  I am looking for a list of pharmaceutical and/or biotech
companies that do not use animals for research or experimentation. 
The bigger the better.

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Clarification of Question by vagabono-ga on 22 Jul 2004 08:06 PDT

I am looking for companies that do preclinical research that don't use animals.

I doubt you will ever find one pharma company that doesn't use
animals. Maybe herbal companies, but that's because they're not
restricted by the FDA, and their products can make general therapeutic
claims without any evidence, according to DSHEA, passed in 1996.
Pharma companies must first pass drugs through toxicological studies
(i.e., to find out if the drug damages any tissues or organs). They
can predict the effects using physiological and stuctural biological
theories, but sometimes there are just occurences that you can't
predict, and animals are used for that (rather than humans--
naturally, unless you wanted to volunteer for that). This, of course,
is only after the drug has been proven to interact with enymes, etc.
in vitro and give some desired effect, i.e., they are only allowed to
use the new drugs if it has been shown to theoretically give some
therapeutic value. It's not like they are just throwing chemicals into
animals to see what happens. They know very well the physiology of lab
mice, and then can predict the effects in humans much, much better. I
have conducted human research, and it is actually harder to get
approval to do animal research now-a-days than it is to do human
research. But now I'm way off topic.

Thanks for your comment.  I should have been more specific in the
subject line.  I am looking for companies that do pleclinical work
that does not utilize animals.  I became interested in the issue after
reading "What Do We Do If We Don't Experiment On Animals" by Drs. Jean
Swingle Greek and C. Ray Greek.  I realize that it's an FDA
requirement to test in animals before going into man, but that
necessity is called into question by the writers.

I have not read that article, but as a research scientist, I can
promise you that animal tests are necessary if you want to protect
human lives.  End of story.  You can use existing science to predict
the effects of a drug, but any new compound can have unexpected
effects in a physiological system.  There are so many things we still
do not understand, so using computer models, etc. are pointless since
you can't program parameters that we don't know about yet.  We have to
test drugs in some kind of living system, either animal or human.  The
FDA (and, in fact, our government in general) has deemed human life
more valuable than animal life, and therefore tests must take place in
animals before the drug can be used in humans.  We could skip tests in
animals and skip straight to humans, but the loss of human life is
unacceptable.  Now, whether you think human life is more valuable than
animal life is another matter.  I personally agree with the
government. Some other groups, like PETA, seem to disagree.  That is a
personal morality choice.  However, at this time, the majority of
Americans place higher value on human life, and thus animal testing of
drugs is necessary.  A "pharmaceutical" company that doesn't do animal
testing isn't a true drug researcher.

to be honest, even if a company says they don't test on animals, it
has been known they use ingredients which have been previously by
another company, or another possibility is that I know it is possible
to outsource testing to another company.