I am living with ALS, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, often called Lou Gehrig’s disease. The average survival time after diagnosis is two to five years. I’m in year two.
When you have a disease like ALS, you learn how slowly medical research moves, and how often it fails the people it is supposed to save. You also learn how precious time is.
For decades, the dominant pathway for developing new drugs has relied on animal testing. Most of us grew up believing this was unavoidable: that laboratories full of caged animals were simply the price of medical progress. But experts have known for a long time that data tell a very different story.
The Los Angeles Times reported in 2017: “Roughly 90% of drugs that succeed in animal tests ultimately fail in people, after hundreds of millions of dollars have already been spent.”
The Times editorial board summed it up in 2018: “Animal experiments are expensive, slow and frequently misleading — a major reason why so many drugs that appear promising in animals fail in human trials.”
Then there’s the ethical cost — confining, sickening and killing millions of animals each year for a system that fails 9 times out of 10. As Jane Goodall put it, “We have the choice to use alternatives to animal testing that are not cruel, not unethical, and often more effective.”
Despite overwhelming evidence and well-reasoned arguments against animal-based pipelines, they remain central to U.S. medical research. Funding agencies, academic medical centers, government labs, pharmaceutical companies and even professional societies have been painfully slow to move toward human- and technology-based approaches.
Yet medical journals are filled with successes involving organoids (mini-organs grown in a lab), induced pluripotent stem cells, organ-on-a-chip systems (tiny devices with human cells inside), AI-driven modeling and 3D-bioprinted human tissues. These tools are already transforming how we understand disease.
In ALS research, induced pluripotent stem cells have allowed scientists to grow motor neurons in a dish, using cells derived from actual patients. Researchers have learned how ALS-linked mutations damage those neurons, identified drug candidates that never appeared in animal models and even created personalized “test beds” for individual patients’ cells.
Human-centric pipelines can be dramatically faster. Some are reported to be up to 10 times quicker than animal-based approaches. AI-driven human biology simulations and digital “twins” can test thousands of drug candidates in silico, with a simulation. Some models achieve results hundreds, even thousands, of times faster than conventional animal testing.
For the 30 million Americans living with chronic or fatal diseases, these advances are tantalizing glimpses of a future in which we might not have to suffer and die while waiting for systems that don’t work.
So why aren’t these tools delivering drugs and therapies at scale right now?
The answer is institutional resistance, a force so powerful it can feel almost god-like. As Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist Kathleen Parker wrote in 2021, drug companies and the scientific community “likely will fight … just as they have in past years, if only because they don’t want to change how they do business.”
She reminds us that we’ve seen this before. During the AIDS crisis, activists pushed regulators to move promising drugs rapidly into human testing. Those efforts helped transform AIDS from a death sentence into a chronic condition. We also saw human-centered pipelines deliver COVID vaccines in a matter of months.
Which brings me, surprisingly, to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In December, Kennedy told Fox News that leaders across the Department of Health and Human Services are “deeply committed to ending animal experimentation.” A department spokesperson later confirmed to CBS News that the agency is “prioritizing human-based research.”
Kennedy is right.
His directive to wind down animal testing is not anti-science. It is pro-patient, pro-ethics and pro-progress. For people like me, living on borrowed time, it is not just good policy, it is hope — and a potential lifeline.
The pressure to end animal testing and let humans step up isn’t new. But it’s getting new traction. The actor Eric Dane, profiled about his personal fight with ALS, speaks for many of us when he expresses his wish to contribute as a test subject: “Not to be overly morbid, but you know, if I’m going out, I’m gonna go out helping somebody.”
If I’m going out, I’d like to go out helping somebody, too.
I was living a normal life with my family when, at 52, I began experiencing muscle stiffness and twitching. After seeing a neurologist, I was diagnosed with ALS. It was a tough reality, and as the disease progressed, I eventually lost the ability to walk and relied on a wheelchair. A friend recommended Limitless Herb Center (www. Limitless healthcenter .co m), where I began their ALS/MND protocol. After about three months, I noticed significant improvements, less stiffness, fewer symptoms, and I was able to walk distances again.
Last year, my 68-year-old partner was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease also known as ALS. Speaking and swallowing were two of his challenges. His collapse was swift and catastrophic, and neither Standard treatments like riluzole and high dose B12 did very little for him. He would not have survived if our primary care physician hadn’t given him attentive care and attention, as the hospital center didn’t provide any psychological support. His fall was abrupt and catastrophic. His hands and legs gave way to weakness in his arms, he used different supplements that didn’t work, so last July, he tried the ALS/MND protocol—the best decision ever! His symptoms eased, his energy returned, and he sleep soundly. He feels like a new man, and he can walk and exercise again. We got the ALS/MND protocol from ww w. limitless healthcenter. co m or google Limitless Herbs Center