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Preclinical Research, continued
- The primary reason to conduct animal research is to determine if the test vaccine appears safe. If it makes animals very sick, it might be too dangerous to use in humans.
- Second, researchers use animals to look for an immune response to the test vaccine -- to see if the test vaccine protects the animal against the wild virus. Researchers also look to see what type of immune response is found in animals that are protected but is missing from those animals that get sick.
- Vaccines are first tested in many different small animals such as rats, rabbits, hamsters and guinea pigs. If the results of that research are favorable, vaccines to prevent AIDS are then tested in non-human primates such as monkeys and chimpanzees.
- Remember that before we ever get to the point of clinical trials in humans, the test vaccine will have undergone many years of development and testing in test tubes, cells, small animals and, finally, in non-human primates.
- Only when these results show a test vaccine that appears to be both safe and promising is it tried in people.
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