@LillyPad – John Lechleiter – Please stop testing on all animals. I am a PETA member and have received many

Nancy Gisler sent a message to John Lechleiter that said:

Please stop testing on all animals.

I am a PETA member and have received many emails regarding your company's refusal to stop the useless forced swim test. The following is from my most recent email from PETA:

The CEO of the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, David Ricks, still refuses to do right by small animals and ban the cruel and useless forced swim test, a laboratory test in which a test drug is administered to a mouse or another small animal, who is then dropped into an inescapable container filled with water and forced to swim for their life. Publications as recent as 2019 describe the company's use of the test and show that it hasn't led to any marketable drugs to treat human depression.

The forced swim test has been criticized and banned by a dozen major pharmaceutical companies, including Johnson & Johnson, Bayer, Roche, and GlaxoSmithKline.

Here is additional information from a different PETA email addressing non-human testing for a COVID-19 vaccine:

Three-dimensional reconstructed human respiratory tissue models, such as those from Epithelix Sàrl and MatTek Life Sciences, can be used to study COVID-19 infection and screen for potential treatments. A longtime supporter of the two companies, the PETA International Science Consortium Ltd. helped fund the development of a first-of-its-kind model of the lower respiratory tract, EpiAlveolar, available from MatTek Life Sciences. EpiAlveolar is a three-dimensional model composed of human cells from the lower respiratory tract. The cells can be exposed to the test material in the air on one side and can receive nourishment from a nutrient-rich Unlike pointlessly infecting mice, this work provides crucial information.

Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee are using Summit—the world’s smartest and most powerful supercomputer—to identify existing drugs that could be effective in treating COVID-19 in humans. Based on the physical properties of the virus and of each drug, the computer predicts how the two might interact. The effectiveness of promising drugs can then be measured by testing them on cells infected with the virus.

A North Carolina company is working to “develop biological 3-D models for all major organs and disease states.” PETA has long supported in vitro testing methods such as these, which use human cells. This way, tests that study the way a drug behaves in human tissue can be performed instead of pointless tests on animals that aren’t relevant to human health. The company states, “Given the rapid spread of COVID-19, we are quickly redeploying some of our internal resources to develop a lung model for research into potential COVID-19 treatments.”

NIH reports that 95 out of every 100 new drugs that pass animal tests fail in humans, because they are either unsafe or ineffective. Mice—who have to be genetically engineered just to be susceptible to the disease—show only mild symptoms of COVID-19. Dr Stanley Perlman, a coronavirologist at the University of Iowa, notes that infecting mice “doesn’t really tell you much about how the virus causes disease.”

In this time of great uncertainty and confusion, there’s one thing we do know for sure: Experimenting on animals is not only unethical but also unjustifiable from a scientific perspective.

Please demonstrate and advertise Eli Lilly has a heart and will stop all animal testing.

Thank you.