News

Published: 02 June 2023

The global pharmaceutical company wants to use better, animal-free methods in the future

Merck, the oldest and one of the largest pharmaceutical and chemical companies in the world, has set itself the goal of eliminating animal testing in the development and testing of its active substances in the future. In an interview, the company's CEO, Belén Garijo, talks about Merck's ambition to move to modern and more predictive non-animal testing systems in the near future.

With more than 60,000 employees and annual sales of EUR 22.2 billion, the Darmstadt-based company Merck is one of the giants of the chemical and pharmaceutical industry. The giant DAX corporation has a diverse portfolio of healthcare, life sciences, and electronics products that are sold worldwide.

According to Merck, it used almost 150,000 animals, mostly rats and mice, for animal experiments in 2022. While that number is shockingly high, the company has reduced the number of animals used in experiments by 17 % over the past five years. Merck's CEO, Belén Garijo, recently reported that the company wants to further reduce the number of animal experiments significantly in the coming years. "We don't want to do any more animal experiments," she said in an interview with the German "Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung" according to the company’s notice.

Instead of animal testing, Merck seeks to use modern, animal-free methods that enable more accurate predictions about the effectiveness of drugs. A big challenge in this process would be the conviction of regulatory authorities to accept these methods. According to Garijo, this has already been partially achieved in Canada and the USA. She states that the situation in Europe is moving in a similar direction and that this is a basic change regarding the development and testing of chemicals and medicines.

Recently, two other major global pharmaceutical companies reported plans to move away from animal testing towards modern non-animal testing methods. The huge Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche founded the "Institute of Human Biology" in Basel, which is dedicated to modern, human-relevant, animal-free methods in drug development. In addition, the pharmaceutical company Sanofi has announced that it intends to halve the number of laboratory animals by 2030.

"This explicit shift towards non-animal methods at large pharmaceutical companies such as Merck, Roche, and Sanofi is clear proof of the superiority of these methods over animal testing," says Dr Dilyana Filipova, scientific officer at Doctors Against Animal Experiments (DAAE). “Moreover, this is a sign that an end to animal testing is in sight. The future is cruelty-free,” says Filipova.

Belén Garijo expects this change to happen in the near future. "I venture a personal speculation: It will no longer be a question of decades, but only of years," says Garijo.

DAAE urges other pharmaceutical companies and researchers at universities and scientific institutions to follow this paragon and use modern, animal-free methods. More than 1,700 of these so-called new approach methods can already be found in the DAAE’s NAT database for animal-free methods.