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Physicians Committee Applauds New Guidance on Animal Use From the National Cancer Institute
In August, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) published new guidance on grant applications for studies involving animal experiments. This guidance requires researchers to justify their use of animals in the publicly available abstract section of applications and encourages them to use human-based methods.
Making Animal Use More Transparent
Researchers applying for grants from the NIH to conduct animal experiments are currently required to provide justifications for using animals in a section of the application that is hidden from public view. The new guidance requires researchers applying for funds from NCI—the largest of the NIH institutes—to include justifications for using animals in their application abstracts.
Abstracts are a brief standalone summary of the full funding proposal, and, perhaps most importantly, publicly accessible via NIH’s grants database, RePORTER. Entries in RePORTER do not always provide clear information regarding animal use. This change will make animal use clearly visible to the public, improving transparency and accountability around taxpayer-funded animal experimentation.
Encouraging Researchers to Use Human-Based Methods
Human-based methods are rapidly advancing in all areas of research, including cancer research. The new guidance highlights the importance of selecting methods for human health impact, noting that human-based approaches can be used to gain insights directly relevant to specific cancers and encouraging cancer researchers to use these models.
Physicians Committee Advocacy
In recent comments submitted to two different NIH advisory groups, one that advises NCI and one that advises the agency more broadly, Physicians Committee experts applauded the new NCI guidance and made recommendations that would expand its impact:
- To make animal use reporting even more transparent, we recommend that the entire agency—not just NCI—take animal use information that’s already collected in grant applications and make it publicly available and easily searchable in RePORTER entries.
- To ensure nonanimal approaches are evaluated fairly and by experts who understand their technical details and advantages, NCI should work with the broader agency to recruit grant application reviewers with expertise in the use of human-based methods for cancer research.
We will continue to communicate with federal leaders and look forward to seeing how this guidance is implemented.
