A social media post from the US Food and Drug Administration this week shows a big-eyed macaque staring out from behind bars.“Some drugs use 144 monkeys on average for preclinical testing,” the post says. “We’re changing that.”Animal testing has been a target of the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again movement, and on Wednesday, the FDA released draft guidance that aims to clear up how drug developers can use alternative testing when seeking approvals from regulators.The National Institutes of Health also announced that it’s investing $150 million to develop animal model alternatives.AdvertisementAdvertisement“This draft guidance advances our commitment to replace animal testing with human-relevant, scientifically rigorous methods,” US Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a statement.The guidance is not final, but it’s meant to steer drugmakers toward what the industry calls New Approach Methodologies instead of the animal research that “historically, sponsors have defaulted to,” an FDA official said Tuesday. Changing the approach could even speed drug development, the official said.“These data can be much more predictive and also a more ethical option,” the official said during a briefing with reporters.That doesn’t mean animal testing in the United States is over.AdvertisementAdvertisementNew technologies can’t handle all the questions scientists rely on animals to answer, experts said. The new guidance also doesn’t address how animals are used in the federal government’s own research or shed more light on how many animals are currently used for testing.“There’s a huge amount of work to be done. We do so many different types of animal experiments on so many different types of animals, and the numbers are just staggering. But we already have seen some progress, and I’m optimistic we will see some more,” said Delcianna Winders, director of the Animal Law and Policy Institute and an associate professor of law at Vermont Law and Graduate School. “We are in a moment of opportunity that we’ve never seen before.”A research monkey sits in the grass in Heidelberg, Mississippi, in October after a truck carrying it overturned. – Scotty Ray Boyd/APWhy animals are used in testingAnimals have played a key role in some of the most important lifesaving scientific discoveries in history. They are biologically similar to humans and often get the same diseases, but their environment is easier to control. They also generally have shorter lives than humans, so a therapy can be studied over an animal’s entire lifetime.All three 2025 Nobel Prize winners in medicine used mice to help develop breakthrough theories about the immune system that led to new cancer treatments and advances in organ transplants. Hundreds of clinical trials underway build on this work, according to the Foundation for Biomedical Research.AdvertisementAdvertisementAlthough much of the public believes that such research is helpful, Americans are becoming less tolerant of animal testing. In 2001, 65% of Americans polled said they found testing on animals morally acceptable. In a September Gallup poll, support had slipped to 47%, with another 47% calling such research morally wrong. The rest polled had no opinion or said it “depends.”More in ScienceThe bulk of animal testing is for experimental procedures for purposes like basic research, to develop treatments for health problems in animals and humans, regulatory research, and in safety testing for pharmaceuticals and other substances.Others are used for breeding experiments. Animals are also used to find better ways to protect the natural environment and prese …
