Animal Experiments: Medical Research

Anna Gelderd Excerpts

Monday 16th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Irene Campbell]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention and fully agree with everything he has said. I will speak about those matters a bit later.

To achieve those aims, we must consider several things. There needs to be a serious shift in funding towards non-animal methods. The all-party parliamentary group on human-relevant science estimated that human-relevant, non-animal method funding

“represents between 0.2% and 0.6% of total biomedical research funding in the UK and ~0.02% of the total public expenditure…on R&D.”

That needs to shift considerably. The cosmetics brand Lush is one of the groups working to fill this funding gap, with prize funds that support initiatives to end or replace animal testing. Recent winners range from organ-on-a-chip technologies that emulate the human liver, developments in in-silico models to predict cellular processes at a molecular level, and a research group improving multi-material bioprinting platforms for creating 3D human organ-on-a-chip models. These non-animal methods can be far more relevant and accurate to human bodies, compared with testing on other species.

Given the success of the cosmetic industry phase-out, this proven approach could be replicated and provide a legislative blueprint for the next steps in the medical sector. In March 2013, a complete marketing ban on all endpoints for animal testing on cosmetics was introduced; on the day of the ban’s introduction in 2013, the European Commission confirmed that between 2007 and 2011, a total of €238 million was invested in research into alternatives to animal testing in the EU, reflecting major investment envisaged for use well beyond the cosmetics industry.

[Anna Gelderd (South East Cornwall) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that funding for computer modelling and artificial intelligence opportunities are vital for this sector, especially as we look to reduce cruelty in animal testing?

[Irene Campbell]

I could not agree more with my hon. Friend.

It is worth questioning the quality of care for animals used in animal experiments. Answers to written parliamentary questions indicate that only one licence application has been rejected over the past seven years, indicating that licences to conduct animal experiments are rarely refused. Applicants are also allowed to adjust and resubmit licence applications to enable them to be granted; for the past four years, applications had a mean number of 2.55 iterations before they were granted.

According to Animal Free Research, a group that supports scientists to transition from animal-based to human-specific medical research and provides expertise in this area, 154,904 animals were involved in breaches of animal use licence conditions in 2023. Breaches included non-compliance, adverse welfare outcomes, failure to provide adequate care and failure to provide food and water, in some cases for up to six days.

An estimated 92% of drugs fail in human clinical trials even though they have passed pre-clinical tests, including animal tests. We already know that our bodies are very different to those of other species and that animals are not a reliable testing method—a simple example is the number of foods that are poisonous to animals but not to humans, such as chocolate, which is poisonous to dogs.

One example of that failure is the case of sepsis, a condition that kills 48,000 people in the UK every year. Researchers rely on testing on mice, yet hundreds of drugs that have passed tests on mice have gone on to fail in human trials, demonstrating the unsurprising fact that sepsis in humans is different to sepsis in mice. Researchers from Stanford and Harvard have shown that the genetic responses to inflammation in mice are profoundly different from those in humans, so why do we continue to undertake this horrific testing? I could describe the process of inducing sepsis in mice—I had actually written it out for this debate—but it is extremely distressing, and many would find it very upsetting. I suggest that any Member interested in finding out what defines a severe animal experiment should look it up. It is, indeed, truly horrific.

Many other disease models have a history of poor translatability in humans, such as sepsis, as we have just heard, or type 2 diabetes, which could be prime candidates for phasing in more human-relevant models. An example from many years ago is thalidomide, which was tested and tested on mice, and caused no problems whatsoever; however, when taken by pregnant women, many babies were born without limbs, and with other problems. When that drug was tested on mice, it had no impact whatsoever on the baby mice when they were born. To use diabetes as an example, rodents differ from humans on every tier of glucose regulation, yet they are still used in experiments rather than relevant human-based methods.

The Labour manifesto commits the Government to partnering with scientists, industry and civil society to phase out animals in medical testing. Science is—