Hey big spender! Who actually funds non-animal technologies?

Posted: by Chris Magee on 29/10/24

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Hey big spender! Who actually funds non-animal technologies?

Hint: it’s not the people shouting about ending animal research.

There’s something seductive about the anti-animal research worldview. It isn’t concern for animals – everyone feels that. It’s more that you get to pretend to be a hero, “saving” animals, which is a hat we would all like to wear.

Unfortunately for the self-appointed white knights of animal activism, banning animal research wouldn’t, in fact, save many animal lives. An end to animal research tomorrow would in one sense “rescue” as many animals per year as will be eaten for lunch today (although, in reality, research animals are all bred for purpose so they wouldn’t be born at all) but it would be at the expense of a much larger cohort of animals that are protected by the results of scientific research.  These include wild animals, farmed animals, pets, animals endangered by climate change or harmed by chemicals already in the environment and, yes, human beings. The wellbeing or survival of these other animals is not given enough weight by protesters to justify even a mild experiment on an animal in a lab.

It is possible to steal – sorry, liberate –  a lab animal, but it will be replaced. The sum total of suffering is not reduced. The whole point of animal research is to use the smallest number of animals possible, as humanely as possible and in carefully controlled and regulated circumstances, to prevent greater human and animal suffering. Simply ignoring the other side of the equation, or pretending there are viable alternatives, isn’t kindness: it’s negligence.

Even apparently simple moral calculations can lose their clarity on closer examination. Is it really better to let already-available sunscreen bleach coral reefs to avoid submitting animals in laboratories to the experimental procedures that could prevent it? Is it better to risk human infertility from essential, commonly used products than to test for those effects in pain-free experiments on rats? Do the fish in the lab consent to taking part in safety tests? No. But do far larger numbers of wild fish consent to being poisoned by cosmetics ingredients that are deemed “safe” because they don’t harm humans? Also no. Far from increasing animal suffering, properly conducted animal research chooses the smallest number of animals – themselves “subjects of a life”– and the least possible harm compared to the other scenarios on the table.

The ideal outcome, of course, would be to develop methods for these indispensable tests that don’t use live animals. On that front, self-aggrandising activists are nowhere to be seen, but there is already a vast amount of different sorts of work that goes into phasing-in new non-animal methods and approaches as they are developed by the life sciences sector. As an example, the UK’s excellent NC3Rs, has a core budget of around £10 million a year and funds many projects to reduce the number of animals needed, to replace them all together where possible and to refine experiments and living conditions to minimise suffering. As just one example on the replacement front, the “virtual dog” project aims to mine historical dog data and apply it through computational models to new compounds in the hope that many more live dogs can be removed from regulatory testing. 

In 2009, the NC3Rs was instrumental in removing, on a global level, the only animal test where death was the intended outcome (ICH M3) in the international standards for drug testing. Indeed, they are often a conduit for pharma industry initiatives in this space, and their ‘virtual dog’ is part-funded by GSK.   

Perhaps as important, however, is the “soft power” that this organisation can bring to bear, and which money can’t buy. They can be the trustworthy, honest broker between commercial rivals in data-sharing initiatives and also have strong ties to academia and regulatory bodies. A new paper in the journal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology does a great job of summing up the wider picture, identifying who does what and some of the challenges involved.  

Yet, where cash is concerned, the biggest spender by far is the commercial sector – the contract research organisations that undertake things like regulatory animal testing. This takes several forms. Labcorp is both investor in, and collaborator on, projects to develop organs-on-a-chip and dozens of other technologies. These are some of the people who actually use the tools day in, day out and are best placed to invent and refine new ones. 

Charles River Laboratories (CRL), which routinely has groups protesting against its animal work, spends £3.9million on developing animal replacements every single month. It will amount to an investment of some $300 million up to 2030,(£250 million) adding to an existing $200 million (£166 million) spent in the past four years.   

To put that in perspective, the Lush Prize for replacements in animal research – celebrated by prominent animal rights activists – is a mere £250,000 a year, a figure that Charles River’s latest funding round will exceed in just two days. Animal Free Research UK claims to have granted “more than £10million’” to replacement projects in its entire history, a figure which is matched roughly every two and a half months by Charles River, but the cash from AFRUK has been eked out so gradually over the course of its 54 years that we probably have to consider inflation. Last year, Animal Free Research UK seems to have spent more than usual, with £358,524 issued in grants, the equivalent to 2.5 days spending by Charles River Laboratories.  

Animal Free Research UK also funds the “Animal Free Research UK Centre of Excellence” which seeks to improve on the performance of in vitro cell systems. However, its grant is just £600,000 which is stretched over nine years, so about £70,000 a year.  At that rate they will match the annual spend of Charles River in 702 years. 

Approximate annual spending on Non-animal Technologies (NATs) and Non-animal Methods (NAMs) bar graph
 

The government of the Netherlands isn’t doing too badly in this space. Fresh from abandoning its naïve targets for ending animal testing by 2025 (!) its National Growth Fund will invest €124.5 million (£103.5million) in a new centre known as the Centre for Animal-Free Biomedical Translation. Of this investment, €55 million (£48million) are awarded directly and €69.5 million (£58.5 million) are granted subject to conditions. 

Germany is the other large contributor in Europe through both federal and state initiatives amounting to a little over €10 million (£8.44million) annually. For example, the federal state of Berlin, alongside the central federal government, invested €6.8 million annually from 2019 to 2023 for the construction of the "Simulated Human" centre aimed at developing human model systems. Additionally, individual states like Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria contribute various grants ranging from €200,000 to €500,000 for research and development of non-animal methods​.  

There are also collaborative projects like the “Einstein Center for Alternative Methods to Animal Testing” which, perhaps appropriately, has relatively modest funding –just €1 million (£843,000) per year between 2021 and 2026. 

Things get a bit more complicated when looking at larger entities, such as the US and EU, where alternatives research is often folded into the general research budget.  

Thanks to dedicated initiatives such as the EU’s Joint Research Centre, we at least know that over the past two decades, the European Commission has funded more than 200 projects related to alternative approaches with a total budget of over €700 million (£590million, or £2.9million a year).  

The contribution of the US, however, is virtually impossible to map because the funding is spread across so many different programs and initiatives, some with a focus on replacing animals, some with a focus on finding cheaper and easier ways of working, some in collaboration, some clearly marked as non-animal investment and others not seeking to replace animals per se but all existing models including non-animal assays. US research is also often funded as a one-off “sprint”’ to a specific goal, rather than sustainable, ongoing funding.  

Tox21, from the NIH, FDA and EPA, was funded with over $80 million during its early phases. Its focus was clearly replacing animals with new methods relevant only to humans. Not much use for protecting other species, but at least the aim was clear. The NIH invested $24million into organ-on-a-chip technology in 2017. It has also collaborated with NASA on a common fund to award $1million for the “development, standardization, validation, and use of new approaches that will more accurately model human biology and complement, or in some cases, replace” existing models.  

The NIH's National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) is a major contributor to this program, and receives $823 million for its overall mission. However, only some of this goes to funding non-animal methods. Indeed, they also sponsor new animal models and the mix of animal and non-animal is not reported. 

This lack of transparency isn’t the only complication. 

A reduction in animal use can be, for instance, a side-effect of other developments that simply negate the need to use an animal. That might be some wearable tech for industrial workers that records real-time data on chemical exposure. Or maybe some other tool that wasn’t specifically developed to replace animals, but can be applied to many different problems. 

Equally, however, we keep waking up to new problems – sunscreen that’s safe for humans but turns toxic in the ocean, airborne microplastics, UK cosmetics ingredients suspected of causing cancer and infertility – and animals are simply very often the only way to assess the risk. We need therefore, for the sake of humans and animals alike, to march ahead with new technologies without taking any options off the table completely on principle. 

Dedicated funding for non-animal technologies, then, is primarily led by commercial entities, followed by governments and their general and specialist funding agencies. A long, long, long way behind this are the charities, startups, self-publicists and darlings of activist and media campaigns. 

Some campaign groups, perhaps due to a lack of direct experience with the tools, or an unwillingness to fully understand the complexities involved, seem to have significantly overestimated how quickly non-animal technologies can fully replace animal testing in the short-to-medium term, even as the phasing-in of new techniques continues apace. This is also in the context of various industries realising that in vitro tests very often don’t model the whole-system effects of their products, and so push for non-animal tech as a form of deregulation masked as concern for animals.   

In conclusion, while eliminating animal testing may seem ideal, the reality is far more complex than many activists acknowledge. The most significant progress in developing alternatives comes from within the research industry itself, with substantial investments from commercial entities and, to a lesser degree, governments. Despite claims by advocacy groups, non-animal technologies are not yet advanced enough to safely replace animal testing on a large scale. Progress is being made, but it’s driven by the sustained efforts of scientists working in the labs, not by the protests outside their gates.

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Last edited: 30 October 2024 10:54

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