Along an orchard-lined strip of Lake Bluff Road outside North Rose, the scenery is awash in fields of green, punctuated by dots of red and orange as the mid-summer apples begin to ripen.
Several yards in from the road and amid the sea of foliage stands a nondescript white and blue sign that reads: Marshall BioResources.
Marshall is one of the largest breeding facilities in the country for canines used in animal research. Specifically, it breeds thousands of beagles. And more specifically, the trademarked Marshall Beagle, a proprietary pedigree of beagle bred for testing of medicines and pesticides.
On a rainy summer day last week, several dozen protesters stood at the roadside outside Marshall, leading chants of “No excuse for animal abuse,” and “Free the 23k.” The latter was a reference to the number of beagles thought to be housed at the facility.
The protest was part of a tour of laboratories and breeding facilities by the advocacy group Dog Research Exposed. It sought to bring attention to Marshall on the heels of another breeding facility, Cumberland, Virginia’s Envigo, being handed the largest fine ever recorded under the Animal Welfare Act earlier this year.
That facility was shuttered in 2022 and fined $35 million this past June after an investigation by the U.S. Justice Department.
Envigo allegedly failed to document a cause of death for hundreds of puppies, underfed adult dogs nursing puppies, and failed to provide adequate veterinary care, among other findings.
Some 4,000 beagles were taken from the facility, including Cedric, protest organizer Ellie Hansen’s dog.
“We’re very against animal cruelty as a society, right?” Hansen said. “The things they do to dogs inside the laboratory, if they did them on the front steps outside the laboratory, they would be arrested.”
The protest brought animal rights activists from across the country together with the goal of pushing Marshall to be shut down, the first protest of its kind at the facility. Activists argued that animal testing is cruel, provides limited scientific value, and is becoming increasingly obsolete, given advances in alternative technology.
But the scientific world argues such testing is a necessary, if unfortunate, reality.
Animal testing is used for a vast array of scientific purposes, from drug trials to toxicology studies on pesticides. Alternative technology is nascent and will likely take years, if not decades, to replace animal testing on a large scale.
“If you think about how long it takes to develop technology, and ensure that it works appropriately, we’re sort of in the infancy of this technology,” said Jim Newman, director of strategic communications for Americans for Medical Progress. “But that’s not to say there isn’t tremendous promise.”
Americans for Medical Progress is a nonprofit focused on educating the public about animal research. Marshall referred questions to the group.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture frequently inspects the Wayne County facility. While those inspections have found some incidents of mistreatment, like a kitten found with a broken tail with no adequate explanation, there have been no serious systemic problems reported at Marshall, records show.
Beagles and medical research
Despite being only a half-hour away from the city, most Rochesterians are likely unfamiliar with Marshall Bioresources, although the facility has long been a target of animal rights activists, including the Animal Liberation Front and Showing Animals Respect and Kindness (SHARK).
Founded in 1939 by Marshall Gilman, the company was formerly known as Marshall Farms. At the time, its primary focus was breeding ferrets, developing a proprietary breed known as the Marshall Ferret.
Those ferrets are still bred at Marshall, which is the largest ferret breeder in the country. Those ferrets are used in biomedical research but are also sold in pet shops globally. The company also produces ferret food, toys, and costumes.
As Marshall expanded into scientific supply, so did its roster of animals. The company also breeds the Marshall Cat and Göttingen minipigs.
Animal activists argue the docile demeanor of beagles is attractive to researchers.
“A terrier would bite your face off, but not a beagle,” Hansen said. “That’s what they use them for.”
But while beagles are small, generally friendly, and easy to handle, their specific use is a little more complex.
Decades of scientific research has led to a strong understanding of beagle genetics, and having a specific, consistent lineage helps serve as a baseline for experimentation.
“Whether it’s a rat, or a cat, or a dog, these animals aren’t just random animals, they’re purpose-bred for research,” Newman said. “We can actually breed animals with the purest genetics so we can sort of take out those factors that influence study results.”
According to the Humane Society of America, about 44,000 dogs on average are used annually in animal experimentation in the United States. Dogs are primarily used for toxicology, or safety, testing, including for novel pharmaceuticals, with oversight from the Food and Drug Administration, and pesticides monitored by the Environmental Protection Agency. Beagles also were used by South Korean researchers in 2022 to determine how COVID-19 affects organs.
The vast majority of animals used in experimentation are rodents.
The alternative
In 2022, President Joe Biden signed the FDA Modernization Act 2.0 into law. That bill was one of the first major updates to the FDA in decades and was seen as a major victory for animal rights activists.
The law removed a provision that required animal testing to be used in drug development and opened the door for computer-based models as an alternative. The requirement to use animal testing on all new drugs had been in place since President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act in 1938.
The FDA Modernization Act 3.0, a bipartisan bill, was introduced earlier this year, with the goal of further reducing animal testing and increasing efficiency of drug trials.
“They have computer modeling, they have 50 years of data to work with,” said Andy Dutton, a local animal activist who attended the protest at Marshall. “They have the tissues on a chip, and they can introduce a drug to it and then see how that reacts to it.”
That technology, known as tissue-on-chip or organ-on-a-chip, is one of the more promising alternatives to animal testing currently being studied. That tech, in simplest terms, takes a small sample of human organ cells and places it on a transparent computer chip. The chip is meant to serve as a replica of the organ’s system and give an accurate representation of how a specific drug or toxin interacts with that organ.
James McGrath is a professor of biomedical research at the University of Rochester and one of the scientists leading the development of tissue-on-chip technology. He said the science is promising but is still limited.
“The downside is it models a small part of an organism that’s very complicated and very big, with a lot of interacting systems,” McGrath said. “So that’s what animals provide that these chips, I think, will continue to struggle to provide for a long, long time — is how do these different tissues interact, how does this work at a system level?”
McGrath said a key feature of animal testing that tissue-on-chip is currently incapable of replicating is biodistribution, or where a drug ends up in the body.
Yet while the science is limited, it does already have practical purposes.
Toxicology studies, the same kind of research that beagles are often used for, is where tissue-on-chip tech shows the most potential, McGrath said.
Tissue-on-chip technology strives to achieve two goals: reduce the use of animal testing and increase the efficiency and accuracy of pre-clinical trials. The National Institutes of Health estimates about 30% of new medications fail in human clinical trials after showing safety in animal trials.
While research to build full, interconnected models of the human body on chips is underway, it’s still a long way from implementation.
“I’m not going to say it will never be true, that we can’t achieve those kinds of predictions on a chip, but it’s certainly going to be a lot longer in the future that we stop using animals,” McGrath said.
Animal testing is regulated by the Animal Welfare Act, which requires research institutes performing animal experimentation to have committees to confirm the labs comply with the law.
For the protesters, the goal is to get Marshall shut down entirely. Scarlet Strakova came to the protest from Connecticut with her beagle, Gabby. Gabby, another rescue dog from Envigo, is missing an eye from her time in the facility.
“I think this is not necessary anymore, we know it,” Strakova said. “We don’t need to torture animals.”
For Newman, of Americans for Medical Progress, the use of dogs and other animals in animal testing is an unfortunate reality, something tightly bound to the development of new drugs and better understanding of human physiology.
“This is a gray-area argument. We need to recognize that nobody involved in animal studies wants to study on animals,” Newman said. “But what’s the other choice, ending research altogether?”
