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Swallowing just a few drops of a new vaccine could protect against the deadly Ebola virus. The new immunization is not meant for humans, but chimpanzees and gorillas, for which Ebola is a devastating disease as well. Yet the vaccine may never reach these great apes.
[...] U.S. rules on research with chimpanzees are another hurdle, Walsh says. Further improvements on the vaccine, for instance to prevent it from losing its activity in the tropical heat, would require another round of testing on captive animals. And that looks all but impossible at the moment, he says.
Biomedical research on chimpanzees has been declining for years, and a new rule issued by the U.S. government in 2016 requires a permit under the Endangered Species Act. Although the rule still allows research on captive chimps if it benefits wild populations, the restrictions have made it too expensive to maintain chimpanzee groups for research, says Walsh, who cut his own vaccine study short when the rules took effect last September. Walsh has titled his paper "The Final (Oral Ebola) Vaccine Trial on Captive Chimpanzees?"
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/ebola-vaccine-great-apes-shows-promise-ethical-hurdles-may-block-further-research
http://www.nature.com/articles/srep43339
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 10 2017, @06:03PM (9 children)
This is going to sound like a joke, so you will need to check for yourself, but I don't think people who run preclinical vaccine trials know about blinding. Every single time I check one of their papers (including the one in Nature linked to here) they do not mention blinding, or it is apparent a reviewer made them put in a sentence about not doing it.
While not against animal research in general, I would definitely say these people should not be allowed to torture animals. They should also need to show some basic competence in statistics and understanding of the scientific method (eg in this paper we see many misinterpretations of p-values).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 10 2017, @06:40PM
Remember ZMapp?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4214273/ [nih.gov]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 10 2017, @07:48PM (7 children)
I think you are overestimating the benefit of blinding for this study. What do you want blinded?
As for the statistics, why don't you run the proper tests yourself (raw data is avaliable in the supplement) and send it to the journal/authors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 10 2017, @08:20PM (6 children)
The study was designed to look for a difference between two groups. The researchers (apparently) were not blinded, so they will treat the groups differently. There is no way to meaningfully interpret the results.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 10 2017, @08:44PM (5 children)
Delivery of vaccine and veterinary care of the study animals, laboratory analyses of samples, and statistical analyses were all done by different people at different universities.
What specific parts of the study do you think will be affected due to the lack of blinding?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 10 2017, @09:07PM (4 children)
Everything... For example, the treatment of the animals will be different so they will experience different levels of stress depending on whatever bias the researchers have. This isn't something that should require explanation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 10 2017, @09:28PM (3 children)
Did you even look at the paper? The researchers studied the effects of stress on the animals.
I also fail to see how the supposed researcher bias is going to convince the chimpanzees to specifically produce Ebola neutralizing antibodies. Please dumb-it-down for me since you think it is obvious.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 10 2017, @10:13PM (2 children)
Researcher treats the animals different, resulting in different stress levels, which affects immune response. Except the first step, this is even one of their conclusions:
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 10 2017, @11:23PM (1 child)
Stress does not generate Ebola-specific neutralizing antibodies. You need a BCR that re-arranges due to antigenic stimulation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 10 2017, @11:58PM
Sure, but it apparently is thought to affect the amount of antibody being produced (which was what was looked at here). From looking around, some also say stress is linked to vaccine failure (lack of producing the antibodies), so it possible you could see a total lack of antibody. Anyway, the ways a study can be messed up by bias are pretty much endless. Perhaps the researcher will rerun a negative elisa if they know a vaccination occurred but not otherwise which will generate a false positive, etc.
That is why scientists take the simple and cheap precaution of blinding themselves. There really is no excuse.