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Physicians Committee Applauds New Guidance on Animal Use From Two NIH Institutes
Since August, two institutes at the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI)—published new guidance on grant applications for studies involving animal experiments. Researchers applying for funding from NCI and NHLBI are now encouraged to use human-based methods. When using animals, they must justify it in the publicly available abstract section of applications.
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—and NHLBI 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 more visible to the public, improving transparency and accountability around taxpayer-funded animal experimentation in line with long-standing Physicians Committee recommendations.
Encouraging Researchers to Use Human-Based Methods
Human-based methods are rapidly advancing in all areas of research, but broader adoption is held back by staunch research culture and lack of incentives to change. NCI’s 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. NHLBI’s guidance encourages the replacement of animals in lung, blood, and sleep research and provides several examples of human-based methods that can be used instead, such as a cell-based human heart valve model with realistic mechanical forces and blood flow. Even small nudges of encouragement like these help shift research culture and promote the replacement of animals.
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 requirements and made recommendations that would expand their impact:
- To make animal use reporting even more transparent, we recommend that the entire agency—not just NCI and NHLBI—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, NHLBI, and other institutes should work with the broader agency to recruit grant application reviewers with expertise in the use of human-based methods for relevant areas of research.
We will continue to communicate with federal leaders and look forward to seeing how these requirements impact transparency and progress toward animal reduction goals.
