GoKawiilForward-looking: A £20 million ($27 million) research hub in Cambridge, UK, will create miniature human tissues from NHS patient cells to help scientists test medicines in ways that may better reflect disease. The project will build a library of organoids – small clusters of cells that reproduce important features of organs and tissues. The standardized models will be available to university researchers and drug companies working to identify treatments that are more likely to succeed in patients.
The work is part of the government's plan to reduce the use of animals in research by expanding alternatives known as new approach methodologies. These include organoids, organs-on-chips and AI tools that can process biological data and model disease.
Researchers have grown organoids for more than a decade. Though often smaller than a millimeter, the tissues can show how disease affects cells and how they respond to medicines. Scientists can grow them from tissue taken from patients with specific conditions, allowing them to test whether a treatment works across a group of patients or only in people with a particular form of disease.
At Cambridge, researchers will develop models for a range of uses. Matthias Zilbauer, a clinical professor of pediatric gastroenterology at the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute, is starting with organoids for inflammatory bowel diseases, including Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis.
Other teams will work on tumor organoids for cancer research and brain organoids for neurological conditions. The program will also include heart tissue and electrically active brain cells.
The emphasis is on testing drugs in human tissue earlier in development. More than 90% of drugs that pass animal testing later fail in human trials, studies show. Researchers hope organoids will help drug developers identify poor candidates before advancing them to animal studies or clinical trials.
"A lot of human diseases either do not occur in animals or occur in a different way because they're not human," Zilbauer told The Guardian. "We want tests and models that can tell us which treatments work, and in what patients, and a mouse cannot tell us that."
Animal testing will not disappear in the near term. Some questions still require whole-animal studies, Zilbauer said. But he expects the new models to lower the number of animals used in research. "It's going to have a major impact on the numbers of animals used and the way we develop new drugs in the future," he said. "We're not saying there won't be any animal use in the near or foreseeable future, because there are still certain issues that cannot be tested in these new models, but the reduction is very real."
Britain recorded 2.54 million animal testing procedures last year, down 3.8% from 2024. Mice, rats, fish and birds accounted for more than 90% of the procedures. About 1% involved specially protected animals, including cats, dogs, horses and monkeys.
The government has also awarded £2 million through Innovate UK to nine projects aimed at reducing the use of animals in safety testing. One company, VivoSphere, is growing heart cells in small gel spheres for cardiac safety tests. Traditional studies can use 50 to 100 animals, including guinea pigs, rabbits and dogs.
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