Denmark-based pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk will no longer use live animals in biological batch testing.
The company has confirmed the last test involving the use of animals occurred on 28 November, used to test the company’s haemophilia product recombinant Factor VII.
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Novo Nordisk chief science officer Mads Krogsgaard Thomsen lauded the achievement, adding: "We have been working for more than a decade, in close collaboration with regulatory authorities around the world, to eliminate obsolete tests or develop and certify new laboratory assays that can be used instead of animals."
Having marked the end of the company’s animal testing, Novo Nordisk will now use cells from hamster and other animals in testing production batches, allowing more precision and reliability.
Following a growing number of employees questioning the validity of animal testing procedures, Novo Nordisk established a task force tasked with removing redundant product-control tests in live animals.
The number of animals used at Novo Nordisk has fallen from more than 13,000 a year in the 1990s to just 772 in 2010.
Caption: Animals have been used in the laboratory testing of pharmaceutical products, but will no longer be used by Novo Nordisk.
