Some Notes on NIH & FDA Updates - NAMs and Animal Models
A new roadmap may put fundamental science at even greater risk in the USA.
The NIH and FDA recently held a joint workshop on reducing the use of animals in research. This includes them no longer accepting proposals which rely solely on animal models. They are promoting the use of “New Approach Methodologies” (NAMs) which include organs on a chip and AI.
Science has embraced the 3 Rs for more than 50 years. These principles revolve around reducing the number of animals we use, refining the work done with animals, and replacing the animals used. While the new FDA/NIH roadmap may mesh well with these principals, these things take time and a substantial investment of resources to develop and validate these NAM to ensure they can accurately replace these animal models. These are resources which have been recently stripped from many research groups in America.
Furthermore, researchers involved in “basic science” (aka fundamental science) are some of the most impacted by this proposal, where there are too many unknowns related to the fundamental biological processes being studied to make NAMs viable as a replacement.
This new roadmap creates additional barriers for scientists in America and puts our world class scientific research in jeopardy. Scientists are already required at most research institutions to outline alternative animal models and non-animal research methods in their research protocols.
You have until 5pm ET today (Monday, July 14th) to provide comment on this topic to the NIH and the FDA. The link is here.
Want to learn more about how fundamental animal models like zebrafish and other aquatic animals are to science? Be sure to check out the following episodes of our podcast:
Episode 7: Zebrafish as a Model for Joint Regeneration with Ernesto Gagarin
Episode 19: Cuttlefish Husbandry and Research with Connor Gibbons
Episode 28: Zebrafish as a Model for Infectious Disease with Dr. Corbin Schuster
Episode 29: Zebrafish as a Model for Developmental Neuroscience with Dr. Ankur Saxena
Episode 32: Zebrafish as a Model for Muscle Development with Dr. Caitlin Ford
If you want to learn how important federal funding is to the advancement of global scientific research, be sure to check out this episode:
Episode 51: Federal Funding for Fish Conservation and Human Health
We’ll be back next week with another episode, but since all of this science work is so important to us and to many of our listeners, we wanted to help get the word out about this developing situation.