READERS may have noticed recent media coverage on the "breakthrough" in research into Down's syndrome, where scientists have managed to recreate a version of the condition in mice. There are numerous reports of "breakthroughs" for diseases, from cancer to Alzheimer's and now Down's syndrome, which typically are much-hyped in the media.

However, how many of these 'breakthroughs' actually lead to cures? We are still not seeing people being cured. Attempting to recreate a condition in mice allows researchers to use animals as 'models' of human conditions on which treatment can be researched and tested.

However animals, make poor 'models' and attempting to extrapolate test results from one species to another is a fundamentally flawed research methodology.

Recreating something similar to Down's syndrome, but in a mouse for example, is very different from studying the naturally occurring condition in a biologically relevant animal -- ie a human patient.

And, like human beings, animals react very differently to disease or illness depending on their physical and psychological states.

All laboratory experiments, be they with or without enrichment, see animals kept in conditions so unnatural that they will be highly stressed, thus rendering the results of experiments even less likely to be relevant to human medicine.

For the benefit of human health therefore, it would be faster, more efficient and more humane if more money were allocated into developing alternatives to testing on animals in the development of medicines, rather than resorting to using animals.

We want to save the lives of both animals in laboratories and people who are ill.

The abolition of vivisection offers this possibility.

ADOLFO SANSOLINI, Chief Executive, British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection