A £22 million programme has been announced to support the UK’s move away from animal testing in science, including a new national hub and nine technology projects.
Science Minister Chris McDonald announced the funding on 12 August. The Government said the work would develop new ways to test medicines on human biology rather than animals and could help treatments for conditions including cancer and inflammatory bowel disease be developed faster and more precisely.
The largest element is a £20 million Pre-clinical Translational Models Hub based in Cambridge. It will lead work to build and share models of human tissue grown from NHS patients for use in testing new treatments.
The hub will focus on organoids, which are tiny simplified versions of human tissue such as gut, tumour or brain models made using donated cells. The Government said these models retain important features of a patient’s biology and can help researchers understand how a real person may respond to a drug.
Scientists in universities and drug companies will be able to use the techniques in their own laboratories to assess which medicines should be pursued. Ministers said the approach would provide additional insights to complement information currently obtained from animals.
Alongside the hub, Innovate UK is investing up to £2 million in nine projects aimed at identifying new animal-free scientific testing methods. Examples cited by the Government include beating heart cells in a dish, lab-grown human ear models and artificial intelligence to predict how medicines move through the body.
The Government said the latest figures show 2.54 million animal testing procedures took place in Great Britain in 2025, down 3.8% on 2024. A further update is due later this year.