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The Physicians Committee Engages With NIH Center on Strategies to Support Human-Based Research
The Physicians Committee recently made recommendations to the National Center for Advancing Translational Science (NCATS) at the National Institutes of Health to prioritize human-based research and reduce animal experimentation as a part of a broader agency-wide initiative.
In December 2025, NCATS Director Dr. Joni Rutter hosted a virtual roundtable to facilitate communication with members of the public and scientific community. Physicians Committee experts joined the discussion to stay informed about the Center’s latest progress and provide input on how it can play a pivotal role expanding the development and use of human-based methods beyond the research it supports—across the entirety of the NIH. To expand on our input, we submitted a public comment to the NCATS Advisory Committee ahead of their January 2026 meeting.
Our recommendations build on measures within the agency’s human-based initiative: to integrate experts on nonanimal methods into study sections and expand funding for human-based infrastructure and training. Specifically, the Physicians Committee encourages NCATS to:
- Help broaden the pool of human-based research experts available for scientific review groups. The integration of reviewers with human-based method expertise is crucial for ensuring that projects proposing to use those methods receive fair and adequate reviews. When reviewers have limited experience with nonanimal methods or hold biases favoring animal-based approaches, projects using nonanimal methods may be disadvantaged. Because NCATS has supported many researchers who have pioneered innovative nonanimal technologies, the Center can play an important role in helping to make these experts available for reviewing grant applications across NIH research areas, not just those strictly related to NCATS.
- Work with the other institutes, centers, and offices within the NIH to expand infrastructure for nonanimal methods. NCATS is already a trusted leader when it comes to developing infrastructure dedicated to human-based methods. Through collaborations with other NIH programs, they can continue to support new funding opportunities for infrastructure projects in even more research areas and applications.
The Physicians Committee looks forward to continued engagement with NCATS and the NIH as the agency-wide human-based initiative is implemented, as barriers for replacing animals are addressed, and as progress for animals takes hold.
