Question: What made you have the rats taste test the medicine?

Robert Ives answered on 19 Sep 2019: last edited 10 Mar 2020 1:08 pm

The most accurate way to taste test a medicine would be to use humans. However, we can only do this once lots of work (called pre-clinical) has already been carried out. This takes a lot of time, and the more time this takes, the longer the patient has to wait to get the medicine that might make them better.

Rats tend to like the same tastes and smells as humans and are also a very accurate way of telling us whether something tastes nice, bad, or just OK. By using rats to taste our medicines, we are able to do this at an earlier stage in development which saves us time and actually helps get the medicine to sick people quicker than if we used humans. Also, if a medicine taste so bad that people won’t take it, we can stop work on the medicine much earlier which might mean we actually use less animals to test medicines overall. So, my taste test rats (who have never become ill from tasting tiny amounts of medicine) can actual reduce the amount of animals used to test medicines.