The change will be overseen by a new office within the National Institutes of Health.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) on April 29 unveiled a new plan to replace some animal testing in federally funded research with alternatives such as lab-grown organs.
The NIH, which funds research across the United States as well as in other countries,
said in a statement that animal testing is still vital when testing new technologies, but that other options can be used “to yield replicable, translatable, and efficient results either alone or in combination with animal models.”
Those options include organoids—simplified, lab-grown versions of organs—computational models, and real-world data.
The Food and Drug Administration, which like the NIH is a division of the Department of Health and Human Services, recently
announced a similar move.
The NIH said it will create a new office within its Office of the Director that will coordinate the plan to replace some animal testing. The NIH is also going to train grant review staff “to address any possible bias towards animal studies and integrate experts on alternative methods into study sections,” the NIH statement said.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the NIH’s director, said in a statement: “For decades, our biomedical research system has relied heavily on animal models. With this initiative, NIH is ushering in a new era of innovation.”
Non-animal methods were the focus of an NIH working group that delivered a
report in 2023 advising the agency’s director on how to incorporate the methods. The group advised prioritizing the development and use of non-animal methods and taking steps to train researchers on the methods.
The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, which advocates for replacing animals in testing, was among the groups praising the new initiative.
“NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya’s historic announcement that the NIH will prioritize human-based science is not only a big win for animals, but also for human health,” Catharine E. Krebs, the committee’s medical research program manager,
said in a statement. “We’ve known for a long time that animal experiments don’t reliably translate to human health outcomes, coming at a grave cost to patients in need of better treatments, to innovation, and to animal lives.”
The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals also expressed support.
“This long-overdue reset for U.S. research will open doors to cutting-edge methods that have languished due to a lack of funding,” Kathy Guillermo, the group’s senior vice president,
said in a statement.
The White Coast Waste Project advocacy group said that adding another NIH office on top of existing bureaucracy and reducing, rather than eliminating, animal testing was not the right move.
“Animal tests are a fraud and a failure,” Anthony Bellotti, the organization’s president, told The Epoch Times in an email. “We don’t need to replace them, we need to defund them.”
