The National Institutes of Health (NIH) on April 29 unveiled a new plan to replace some animal testing in federally funded research with alternatives such as lab-grown organs.
The NIH, which funds research across the United States as well as in other countries, said in a statement that animal testing is still vital when testing new technologies, but that other options can be used “to yield replicable, translatable, and efficient results either alone or in combination with animal models.”
Those options include organoids—simplified, lab-grown versions of organs—computational models, and real-world data.
The Food and Drug Administration, another division of the Department of Health and Human Services, recently announced a similar move….