The relevance of in silico, in vitro and non-human primate based approaches to clinical research on major depressive disorder
Abstract
Major depressive disorder (MDD) is the most severe form of depression and the leading cause of disability worldwide. When considering research approaches aimed at understanding MDD, it is important that their effectiveness is evaluated. Here, we assessed the effectiveness of original studies on MDD by rating their contributions to subsequent medical papers on the subject, and we compared the respective contribution of findings from non-human primate (NHP) studies and from human-based in vitro or in silico research approaches. For each publication, we conducted a quantitative citation analysis and a systematic qualitative analysis of the citations. In the majority of cases, human-based research approaches (both in silico and in vitro) received more citations in subsequent human research papers than did NHP studies. In addition, the human-based approaches were considered to be more relevant to the hypotheses and/or to the methods featured in the citing papers. The results of this study suggest that studies based on in silico and in vitro approaches are taken into account by medical researchers more often than are NHP-based approaches. In addition, these human-based approaches are usually cheaper and less ethically contentious than NHP studies. Therefore, we suggest that the traditional animal-based approach for testing medical hypotheses should be revised, and more opportunities created for further developing human-relevant innovative techniques.
Citation
Carvalho , C , Varela , S A M , Bastos , L F , Orfão , I , Beja , V , Sapage , M , Marques , T A , Knight , A & Vicente , L 2019 , ' The relevance of in silico , in vitro and non-human primate based approaches to clinical research on major depressive disorder ' , Alternatives to Laboratory Animals , vol. 47 , no. 3-4 , pp. 128-139 . https://doi.org/10.1177/0261192919885578
Publication
Alternatives to Laboratory Animals
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0261-1929Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © The Author(s) 2019. Open Access. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License g(http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
Description
This study was financed by Animalfree Research–Switzerland, and by Portuguese national funds through FCT–Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, within the CFCUL Unit funding UID/FIL/00678/2013. TAM received partial support from CEAUL (funded by FCT–Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, Portugal, through the project UID/MAT/00006/2019). Open access publication costs were covered by Animalfree Research–Switzerland and by funding provided by the Ketty and Leif Hjordt Foundation.Collections
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