Animals & Politics

By Sara Amundson and Kitty Block

A major roadblock to ending animal experiments is the lack of funding to develop technologies that can replace them. But last week, the National Institutes of Health helped close that gap. The U.S. government agency announced that it is investing more than $150 million to develop cutting edge nonanimal research methods that better simulate human biology—without harming animals. This represents NIH’s largest investment to date in non-animal methods.

As the world’s largest funder of biomedical research, NIH has the power to shape how research and testing dollars are spent not just in the U.S., but around the world. Globally, an estimated 190 million cats, monkeys, mice and other animals suffer in harmful experiments every year.

The funding will be awarded to research teams across the U.S. and be used to establish “technology development centers” that will create sophisticated non-animal methods for studying gynecological disorders, cardiac disease, neurological disorders, rare diseases and other conditions. The centers will also focus on developing advanced non-animal tests that can assess how things from pesticides to laundry detergent can affect human health and the environment.

Because animals and humans are so biologically different, animal experiments do a poor job of mimicking the human body. The result is that they are actually hindering—not advancing—science. For example, according to NIH, more than 90% of drugs that appear successful in animal tests go on to fail in human clinical trials. In contrast, cutting-edge alternatives use human data, tissues and cells to create technologies like organs-on-a-chip, 3D human tissue models, advanced human cell-based systems, computational models and AI-driven simulations based on how the human body works.

For decades, we’ve made the case that Congress and government agencies should prioritize and increase funding for research and testing methods that don’t rely on animals, and we secured congressional support through the federal appropriations process. We’ve also worked in collaboration with NIH to ensure that human-based research methods replace animal experiments for drugs and other products.

This dramatic funding commitment is just the latest example of the work NIH has done to begin to phase out animal experiments in favor of sophisticated human-based techniques.

• Last April, the agency made the groundbreaking announcement that it would prioritize human-based research technologies and reduce the number of animal experiments funded by the agency.
• In May, NIH revealed that it had closed the last beagle laboratory on its campus—a lab that carried out experiments on thousands of dogs.
• In July, NIH announced another shift toward non-animal methods, saying it would “prioritize human-based technologies and models, where scientifically valid and justified,” and that “funding opportunities will indicate a special emphasis on human-based approaches.”
• In September, the agency launched a center dedicated to developing organoid technology that can replace animal experiments, with contracts totaling $87 million for the first three years.
• In February this year, the Oregon Health and Science University entered into talks with NIH about the possibility of turning the Oregon National Primate Research Center, a federally-funded research laboratory with nearly 5,000 monkeys, into a sanctuary.

Over the last year, NIH and other U.S. government agencies have taken extraordinary steps forward for animals in laboratories. We’re continuing to work with scientists, government agencies, legislators, companies and animal advocates around the globe, and we’ll keep doing this work until sophisticated technologies have made animal experiments obsolete.

Kitty Block is president and CEO of Humane World for Animals.