Animal Experiments: Medical Research

Navendu Mishra Excerpts

Monday 16th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Irene Campbell]

I fully agree with my hon. Friend.

[Navendu Mishra (Stockport) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate. Like her, I am a member of the Labour Animal Welfare Society. Will she pay tribute to the work of Animal Free Research UK, which has done a lot of work on this issue, and the campaign on Herbie’s law, which is a proposed framework that would set a deadline of 2035 for phasing out animal experiments in medical research in the UK, and ensure support for scientists making the transition?

[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.