Welcome to The Replacement
a bi-weekly newsletter covering the global transition away from animal testing
Hi readers,
Welcome to the The Replacement, a bi-weekly newsletter covering the global transition away from animal testing. I’m Celia Ford, a neuroscientist-turned-journalist with a deep interest in the world of animal research.
As a PhD student at UC Berkeley, I spent thousands of hours performing neuroscience experiments on rhesus macaques. I was told never to take photos and to speak only in euphemisms — as was everyone else. It’s no surprise that most people don’t know how to feel about animal research.
The media often falls into one of two traps:
glossing over the uncomfortable realities of animal testing, or
uncritically adopting inflammatory language from animal rights groups.
The Replacement aims to fill the space in between.
Here, you’ll find digestible, clear-eyed, and sometimes opinionated summaries of the latest developments in animal research policy and new approach methods (NAMs).
This field can be hopeful, exciting, and awe-inspiring. It can also be nuanced, politically tangled, and uncomfortable.
Big changes are happening now — let’s dive in together.
In today’s newsletter:
‼️ The big news: FDA & NIH commit to reducing the use of animals in research.
💩 In other news: The Trump administration’s war on science continues.
🐣 In the weeds: Biotech startups Axiom and Stately Bio emerge from stealth.
✨ + resources, opportunities, and events
The big news: US federal science agencies plan to reduce animal testing.
In April, both the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced plans to reduce the use of animals in research and safety testing.
The FDA will start asking companies to submit data from experiments using tools like AI and lab-grown tissue models in their requests to begin human clinical trials. Here’s the FDA’s full roadmap, for the policy wonks.
The NIH plans to create a new office, the Office of Research Innovation, Validation, and Application (ORIVA), to help advance non-animal methods like organoids and AI.
Animal welfare advocates are thrilled, alongside researchers who have been pushing NAMs for years.
At PETA, Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo said “champagne corks are popping.”
“This is SO EXCITING,” Catharine Krebs of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine shared on LinkedIn.
“Those of us who care about animals will long remember April 2025 as the month when everything began to turn around on the long-standing moral and scientific problems with animal testing and research,” Center for a Humane Economy president Wayne Pacelle.
Thomas Hartung, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing, agreed that April 2025 marks a “significant turning point,” and called the plans “a paradigm shift in how we approach safety testing and biomedical research.”
The faster-than-expected push to phase out animal testing jolted the market.
Lab animal supplier Charles River’s stock price dropped after the FDA’s announcement, although they’re steadily recovering.
The company said that the FDA’s plans are “consistent with Charles River’s long standing mission to drive greater efficiency in the drug development process.”
If that statement inspires nothing but a massive eye roll, I understand. Charles River has been accused of lying to the government to get federal money, buying illegally smuggled macaques, and repeatedly violating the Animal Welfare Act.
But to their credit, Charles River has already put hundreds of millions of dollars toward making better alternatives to animals, and intends to invest hundreds of millions more.
It makes sense. The animal research industry has been grappling with supply chain issues and pressure from activists for years — Charles River is simply following the money.
Meanwhile, AI-powered biotech stocks skyrocketed immediately following the FDA’s announcement. Organoid makers are also celebrating.
While most organizations emphasize how these announcements mark a win for both animals and science, the watchdog nonprofit White Coat Waste focuses on “wasteful government spending” — and conservatives love it.
In a statement posted on X, White Coat Waste president Anthony Bellotti wrote, “Animal tests are a fraud and a failure. We don’t need to replace them, we need to defund them. The solution is simple: Stop the money. Stop the madness!”
The political vibe is, quite simply, weird.
When I spoke with WCW senior vice president Justin Goodman back in January, he expressed unqualified enthusiasm about the Trump presidency — the guy currently steamrolling American science.
“We are extremely excited that an administration that is skeptical of science and also skeptical of federal spending is coming into power,” Goodman said.
I worry about conflating “Let’s seriously invest in building better research tools that don’t require animals” and “Let’s blindly cut funding for science, because less science = fewer animals in labs.” The former will almost certainly lead to better science and saving lives. The latter risks damaging research pipelines for a generation.
Two big questions:
Massive cuts could make it hard for federal agencies to enforce their new policies.
Trump’s new budget blueprint details plans to cut $18 billion from the NIH budget, following mass layoffs that included five institute directors and over a thousands employees responsible for things like IT, ordering supplies, and handling grants.
The FDA also fired thousands of employees, then reversed some of those layoffs after realizing the agency couldn’t function with its newly-pared-down staff alone. These initial layoffs included nearly everyone from the Division of Drug Information, which normally tracks drug safety.
So: who’s going to be in charge, here?
I’m also not convinced that this will convince everyone to let go of animal models.
There are plenty of areas of research where animals can’t be replaced yet. The body has a lot of organs interacting in mysterious ways, and we don’t know how to replicate all of those interactions in vitro.
Animal research is also deeply embedded in the culture of biomedicine, and many academic careers hinge on its continued relevance.
So: how will the federal government incentivize the shift, while convincing researchers that NAMs are actually ready for primetime?
If you have answers, theories, or more questions, send them my way.
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You can also connect with me on LinkedIn or bluesky.
In other news:
Unexplainable (Vox) | The real quest for fake blood
Nature | Huge reproducibility project fails to validate dozens of biomedical studies
NYT (gift link) | Lab animals face being euthanized as Trump cuts research
Science | How Trump upended science
STAT ($$$) | A court decision on lab-developed tests sets a dangerous precedent
Science | University must hand over names of anonymous animal committee members, court rules
Post and Courier | Trump administration sends $4.1 million for Monkey Island despite efforts to slash federal spending
Washington Examiner ($$$) | Jay Bhattacharya announces NIH ‘got rid’ of all beagle experiment labs
In the weeds:
✨ New biotech company Axiom hopes to replace animal testing with AI — founder Brandon White talks about it here.
🐣 Also emerging from stealth: Stately Bio, a new regenerative medicine company using advanced machine learning to image cells without killing them.
🫠 Following underwhelming results in Phase 2 trials for its lead drug, AI-driven biotech company Recursion Pharmaceuticals cut nearly half of its pipeline.
🚀 Biosimulation company Certara launched their Non-Animal Navigator to help other companies transition to best-fit NAM strategies.
🦠 The latest issue of ALTEX highlights NAMs for studying skin sensitization, gut microbiota, thyroid toxicity, and developmental neurotoxicity.
Resources:
RE-Place database: an inventory of available alternatives to animal testing, managed by Sciensano and Vrije Universiteit Brussel.
Basement Membrane Extract (BME)-free Database: overview of commercially available hydrogel- and coating-based products for in vitro applications, managed by the 3Rs Centre Utrecht in the Netherlands.
SCAHT AOP_HUB: an online platform for researchers advancing Adverse Outcome Pathway development, managed by the Swiss Centre for Applied Human Toxicology.
Opportunities:
Submit a manuscript to Frontiers on the topic “Advancing In Vitro Cell Culture Practices: Achieving Truly Animal-Free Experiments and Scientifically Reliable and Reproducible Methods.” Deadline: May 30.
L'Oréal Research & Innovation is accepting applications for travel grants to support attendance at the World Congress on Alternatives and Animal Use in the Life Sciences. Deadline: June 30.
Replacing Animal Research is accepting grant applications for pilot projects and proof of principle studies that support the replacement of animals in biomedical research. Deadline: July 4 (lead applicant must be UK-based).
Animal-Free Science Advocacy is seeking a volunteer advisor to provide expert guidance on regulatory testing for chemical and pharmaceutical purposes. ~6 hr/month, advanced life sciences degree and experience with regulatory testing/compliance strongly preferred. No deadline listed.
Mark your calendar:
June 9-13: Microphysiological Systems World Summit in Brussels. Register by May 28 for the lowest fees.
July 1, 2025: the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine and Johns Hopkins Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing are hosting an Animal-Free Workshop Series for Early Career Researchers
October 21-23: American Society for Cellular and Computational Toxicology annual meeting in Maryland. Abstract submissions and travel award applications are due July 30.
Have something you want to share with this community? As long as it has something to do with alternatives to animal research and is grounded in science, let me know! This could include:
Press releases and peer-reviewed publications
Open-source databases and other helpful resources
Job listings, award applications, and internships
Conferences, workshops, and meetups
Calls for manuscripts and pitches
Is there anything else you’d like to see in this newsletter? Tell me!
We’re just getting started — let’s build this thing together.
Moving forward, The Replacement will land in your inbox every other Saturday morning starting May 17, and the full resource roundup will be for paid subscribers. Thanks for being here!
Wishing you a minimally-stressful week ahead,
Celia