Question: have you ever experimented on animals?

Dawn Gillies answered on 17 Nov 2016:

I haven’t, but I might in future. This is not to do any harm to the animals but to look at cancer in a safe way. We need to test that drugs are safe before we give them to people, and we need ways of looking at rare diseases that we can’t look at in patients. The cancer I’m working on is pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma. It has a really terrible survival rate, a lot of that is down to the fact that it is usually caught too late. So there aren’t many patients which I could look at the cancer at the early stage in. This research will hopefully improve the outcomes for people who are diagnosed. We can look at how well drug treatments work and think of ways to improve upon them without harming the survival chances of a patient.

Any studies on animals are done because there really is no other option. We share 95% of our genes with mice which is why they are commonly used, and animal research has helped to develop vaccines against polio, TB, HPV, and meningitis. Smallpox has been eradicated because of animal research.