The UK government is investing £22m in human-based drug-testing technologies as it expands research infrastructure intended to reduce reliance on animal testing and improve decisions made before medicines enter clinical trials.
A new Pre-clinical Translational Models Hub in Cambridge will receive £20m to develop and share models of human tissue grown from samples donated by NHS patients. A further £2m from Innovate UK will support nine projects developing alternative approaches.
The technologies include organoids — miniature models that replicate selected features of human organs or tissues — alongside lab-grown heart and ear models and artificial intelligence systems designed to predict how medicines move through the human body.
Science Minister Chris McDonald said: “Today marks another significant step forward in the UK’s move away from animal testing in science and research.”
The programme addresses a persistent difficulty in drug development. Pre-clinical research is intended to identify which potential treatments are sufficiently safe and promising to advance, but findings from existing models do not always translate accurately into human biology.
Late-stage failure is expensive because substantial laboratory time, specialist staff, capital, and clinical planning can already have been committed before a candidate is abandoned. Techniques that improve the quality of evidence earlier in development could therefore affect both research productivity and the cost of bringing medicines through the pipeline.
The Cambridge hub will focus on making human-relevant models accessible to researchers in universities and drug companies. Organoids created from donated cells can reproduce selected features of tissues such as the gut, tumours, or brain, allowing scientists to examine biological responses that may differ from those observed in conventional animal studies.
The government describes the new techniques as complementary to information currently obtained from animals rather than an immediate replacement for every existing pre-clinical method. Wider substitution will depend on whether alternatives can be validated, reproduced consistently, and accepted by researchers and regulators.
The nine Innovate UK projects show the range of technologies being developed. CN Bio is building miniature working versions of human organs that can be used to study how a new medicine moves through and interacts with the body.
Vivosphere UK is extending its work on tumour and liver models to human heart tissue, with the aim of identifying potentially dangerous cardiac effects earlier. Other projects include beating heart cells, lab-grown human ear models, and AI-based approaches to predicting drug behaviour.
The combination of biological and computational methods is becoming increasingly important in life sciences. AI can process large volumes of chemical and biological information, while laboratory models provide physical evidence about how human tissue responds. Neither removes the need for validation, but together they can give researchers additional evidence when deciding which compounds merit further investment.
The government recorded 2.54m animal-testing procedures in Great Britain during 2025, down 3.8% from 2024. Reducing that number further without weakening safety standards will depend on alternatives becoming sufficiently dependable for routine scientific and regulatory use.
Commercial adoption also matters. Research techniques developed successfully in individual laboratories do not automatically become standard industry infrastructure. Models must be transferable between teams, scalable, cost-effective, and supported by sufficiently consistent data if pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies are to build them into development processes.
The UK life sciences sector combines large pharmaceutical groups, smaller biotechnology businesses, universities, hospitals, specialist research organisations, investors, and regulators. Shared infrastructure can reduce duplication across that ecosystem, particularly where sophisticated models would otherwise be too expensive for smaller research teams to establish independently.
Regulatory acceptance will ultimately shape the pace of change. Safety decisions must be supported by evidence that alternative methods perform reliably for their intended purpose, and different models are likely to mature at different speeds depending on the biological question being examined.
The £22m programme is therefore an investment in capability rather than an immediate rewrite of drug-development regulation. Its longer-term value will depend on whether researchers can produce models that improve early-stage decisions, reduce unsuccessful development work, and displace animal testing where a validated human-based method provides better evidence.
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