As the Trump administration looks to reshape biomedicine, it is taking aim at one of the most universal ways scientists study disease and determine whether drugs are safe and may work in people: animal research.
The National Institutes of Health, the nation’s premier funder of biomedical research, announced in July that, effective immediately, it will no longer offer new funding opportunities based solely on animal testing. Instead, the agency will promote the adoption of so-called new approach methodologies, or NAMs, alternatives that range from artificial intelligence to lab-grown cell structures meant to mimic specific organs. The move comes after the Food and Drug Administration announced its own plans to reduce and possibly replace animal testing in drug development.
These agencies’ plans, which have the potential to transform basic research and drug development, have sparked wide-ranging reactions in the scientific community. STAT spoke with more than 10 researchers across fields including cancer biology, immunology, neuroscience, and microbiology. Some said the administration’s pivot has the potential to make research more efficient and to ensure that early-stage findings are more likely to hold up in clinical trials. But others lamented that the change is premature and ignores the inherent limits of alternate approaches. Many experts were somewhere in the middle, in part because it’s unclear precisely how the FDA and NIH will implement their plans.
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