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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Lab. Chip. Technol.
Sec. Organ on a Chip
Volume 3 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/frlct.2024.1426895
This article is part of the Research Topic Celebrating 1 Year of Frontiers in Lab on a Chip Technologies View all 4 articles

An analysis of trends in the use of animal and non-animal methods in biomedical research and toxicology publications

Provisionally accepted
Katy Taylor Katy Taylor Stephanie Modi Stephanie Modi *Jarrod Bailey Jarrod Bailey
  • Animal Free Research UK, London, United Kingdom

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    There have been relatively few attempts to quantitatively assess if, and in which areas, the use of non-animal methods (NAMs) is increasing in biomedical research and importantly, how this compares to the use of live animals. We conducted a bibliometric analysis of the relative publication of papers reporting the use of NAMs-only compared to those reporting the use of animals, even if they also reported the use of NAMs, over the period 2003 to 2022 across seven research areas (breast cancer, lung disease, blood cancer, heart disease, neurodegenerative diseases, diabetes and toxicology) and five regions (USA, China, France, Germany, UK).We found that the relative number of publications of research using NAMs-only has been higher than animal-based research for the last 20 years for all research areas and is growing.Research areas differed in their publication of NAMs-only based work, with breast cancer and lung disease having consistently the highest ratio of NAMs-only to animal-based publications and heart disease, diabetes and toxicology showing the greatest change over the time period. A key period of change was 2016-18. By 2022 the UK had the highest NAMs-only to animalbased research ratio than any other country for five of the seven research areas and China the lowest for six, accounting for publication rate. Tissue and in silico-based methods were the most common of all NAMs-only publications; lab-on-a-chip and stem cell models are increasing in their use but at much lower levels and rate of increase.

    Keywords: Non-animal methods, Animal use, bibliometric analysis, New approach methodologies, organ-on-a-chip, Organoid, stem cell, In silico approaches

    Received: 02 May 2024; Accepted: 15 Jul 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Taylor, Modi and Bailey. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Stephanie Modi, Animal Free Research UK, London, United Kingdom

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.