New NIH office to reduce use of animals in research, shuts down final beagle lab. Agency plans to promote alternative methods and address “bias” toward animal studies in grant review (Apr 2025) Article

[Michael Harrop]

https://www.science.org/content/article/new-nih-office-reduce-use-animals-research
https://www.shorenewsnetwork.com/2025/05/05/nih-shuts-down-final-beagle-lab-ending-decades-of-painful-dog-experiments/

In one of his first public moves as director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Jayanta “Jay” Bhattacharya is creating a new office to coordinate efforts to reduce animal testing across the agency and the research that it funds. A statement from NIH yesterday didn’t provide a timeline

NIH’s prioritization of nonanimal research follows a similar announcement from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration earlier this month that it was phasing out animal testing for certain new therapies.

NIH noted that animal-free research methods could include microfluidic devices that mimic human organs, computational modeling, organoids—organlike structures grown from human stem cells—and real-world data on health outcomes from large groups of people.

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In a televised interview, Bhattacharya stated, “We got rid of all of the beagle experiments on NIH campus.”

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I have mixed feelings about that.

• The gut microbiome is a major factor in why animal studies aren't reproducible and applicable to humans. https://humanmicrobiome.info/animal-models/
• Mouse studies have led to important findings in the microbiome field, such as the long-term harms of antibiotics and junk diets that compound over generations. https://humanmicrobiome.info/antibiotics/
• I'm concerned there may not be a good alternative for using mice to figure out the best methods to clear the existing gut microbiome, which I currently think is the #1 most important scientific pursuit.

But the article is more mild than a recent video I watched that said they were stopping all animal research. So it sounds like they'll still allow for animal research when necessary.