Animal Experiments
The question
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, pursuant to the Answer of 4 March 2025 to Question 33380 on Animal Experiments, what assessment she has made of the adequacy of the concordance range; whether she has made an assessment of the potential limitations of the paper; and whether she has considered evidence on the predictive value of non-animal methods.
Answered by Dan Jarvis
The paper in question is published in a reputable scientific journal and will have undergone rigorous peer review before publication.
The Government invests £10m annually in The National Centre for the Replacement, Refinement and Reduction of Animals in Research (NC3Rs). The NC3Rs places significant investment into programmes and projects specifically for developing non-animal methods.
In March 2023 the NC3Rs made its biggest award to date in a single investment (£1.6M) to develop a ‘Virtual Dog’. The project aims to exploit advances in computational approaches and machine learning to ultimately replace their use as a second species in drug development.
This government has made a commitment to “partner with scientists, industry, and civil society as we work towards the phasing out of animal testing”. The government will publish a strategy to support the development, validation and uptake of alternative methods later this year.
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