May 2021

Dear Friends,

The power of collaboration

Thank you for your kind support, which has enabled us to contact you once again with a brief update on recent progress.

We are very pleased to be working with so many excellent partners on a number of initiatives, which are beginning to bear fruit:

• Our parliamentary Early Day Motion, EDM 256: Accelerating human relevant life sciences in the UK, tabled by Sir David Amess MP on behalf of the Alliance for Human Relevant Science was signed by 103 MPs. This EDM (a parliamentary petition) was the 8th most popular out of 2,276 EDMs in the 2019-2021 parliamentary session, showing just how important the issue is to MPs and their constituents. Thank you for asking your MP to sign. MPs’ support was greatly boosted by encouragement from supporters of our Alliance partners Animal Free Research UK, Cruelty Free International and The Lord Dowding Fund.

• We are also delighted by the progress being made by the All Party Parliamentary Group for Human Relevant Science in gathering evidence about the status of funding and opportunities for human relevant approaches in the UK. Grahame Morris MP superbly chairs the group and its meetings, with a variety of eminent external speakers. The group will report on its findings at the end of this year. We are very grateful to Grahame Morris for distributing a Briefing document to all MPs, to educate them about this vital issue. Please write to your own MP to help them understand the importance of this issue for humanity and ask them to urge the Prime Minister to take decisive action.

• For years Safer Medicines Trust has been calling for a comparison of human-relevant tests versus animal tests to show which is the better way to assess the safety of medicines. We are very proud to have been a partner in a world-first comparative study led by Dr Katya Tsaioun of the US Evidence-based Toxicology Collaboration (EBTC) and the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, with an international collaboration of scientists from many disciplines. We are so pleased to tell you that this long-awaited study has now been published in Nature Scientific Reports: www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-85708-2. This is a landmark study, which demonstrates that sophisticated human-relevant technologies offer a new paradigm for preventing adverse drug reactions and saving patients’ lives, proving superior to animal tests and even human clinical trials in detecting a new medicine’s subtle signals of harm. It is imperative that action is now taken to routinely incorporate these approaches into drug discovery and development, to reduce the ever-increasing toll of adverse drug reactions.

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Please help us to continue this work

Our most important collaboration of all, at the root of all our work, is with you, our wonderful supporters. We literally would not be here without you and we are SO grateful for your generous support, which has kept us going through this past desperate year, when we thought we might not survive until 2021.

Thank you for standing by us and making all of our work possible. There is much work going on behind the scenes, and more progress will be made if you can help us through this financial drought. United, we will stand, with you by our side. Thank you for any help you can give.

Please order copies of our new leaflet for your friends and family, and if you can afford to, please help us with a donation, which will be hugely appreciated, no matter how small. We are still in great need of funds if we are to continue our work to transform medical research from a largely animal-based to a human-based science.

Donate Now

If you already have, thank you so much - our work is simply not possible without your support. 

With grateful thanks and best wishes from all of us at Safer Medicines,

Kathy Archibald, Supporter engagement manager

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PS Pass on something wonderful

Now more than ever Safer Medicines Trust is relying on gifts in Wills from supporters like you to help our work live on.

After taking care of your family and friends, even a small gift can make a huge impact. We’re encouraging everyone to learn more about the power of Wills through a one-minute film starring The Wombles. You can watch the new episode here.

If you’d like to find out more about leaving a gift in your Will, please visit our legacy page.

We are so grateful to all of the wonderful people who have already left legacies to Safer Medicines Trust - it is no exaggeration to say that we simply would not exist without them. We remember them constantly and strive to fulfil their wishes, which drive all of our work.

Safer Medicines Trust is a patient safety charity. Our mission is to change the way medicines are tested, to a system based on human biology: the only way to ensure safety for patients.

Safer Medicines Campaign exists to challenge the regulations that still require animal-based safety tests when superior methods exist.

Help us put patient safety first!

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