Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what steps the Government is taking to prioritise and support research into covid-19 which (a) uses advanced non-animal scientific methods that are relevant to humans and (b) avoids the known issues of species differences which make the translation of animal research data to humans unreliable and can delay or prevent the availability of effective vaccines and treatments.

The Government considers that the carefully regulated use of animals in scientific research remains an important tool in the development of safe new medicines and treatments. At the same time, the Government believes that animals should only be used when there is no practicable alternative and it actively supports and funds the development and dissemination of techniques that replace, reduce and refine the use of animals in research (the 3Rs). This is achieved primarily through funding for the National Centre for the 3Rs (NC3Rs) which has invested £67million in research, and works nationally and internationally to drive the uptake of 3Rs technologies and ensure that advances in the 3Rs are reflected in policy, practice and regulations on animal research.

With regard to specific research into Covid-19, human trials are already underway. The Government is currently funding two UK vaccine candidates; one at the University of Oxford and one at Imperial College, London. The University of Oxford began Phase 1 human safety trials on 23 April and have recently recruited healthy volunteers aged between 18 and 55 to take part in these trials.

Animal testing has not been skipped, however. Clinical trials of any vaccine must follow a predefined development pathway. It was agreed at the meeting of the International Coalition of Medicines Regulatory Authorities, held on 18 March 2020 that it is scientifically justified to use toxicology data and clinical data collected from other trials using animals to support a first-in-human clinical trial for a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine candidate. It was also agreed that data from animal disease models would be required to support Phase II clinical trials.