NIH under fire for funding dog tests despite vow to cut animal research

The US National Institute of Health (NIH) is continuing to fund “cruel and wasteful” animal experiments involving dogs and cats, despite their recent announcement to reduce animal research.

The NIH director, Jay Bhattacharya, announced in April the launch of a new initiative to “reduce testing in animals” and prioritise “human-based technologies” such as organ-on-a-chip and real-world data, in a “new era of innovation” in biomedical research. The move seeks to address longstanding translational failures of animal research to predict human outcomes in diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer’s, “due to differences in anatomy, physiology, lifespan, and disease characteristics”.

However, information obtained by the animal rights NGO White Coat Waste (WCW) shows that the NIH has in fact funded millions of dollars’ worth of new animal experiments.

Analysis of project documents and those obtained through Freedom of Information Act (Foia) requests reveal that the NIH has approved nine new grants for dog research since their April announcement, costing the taxpayer over $12m, as well as extending about nine already active, with total study costs of $42m. WCW says these are in addition to the approximately 193 ongoing NIH-funded dog and cat studies, costing about $1.3bn.

New experiments uncovered by WCW include toxicology testing of an investigational drug to treat methamphetamine addiction. Toxicology tests often involve force-feeding or injecting dogs with increasingly large doses of a compound daily for up to a year.

Extended research includes a cocaine experiment to study cardiovascular effects. This involves beagles being strapped into jackets that inject them with cocaine as well as being force-fed an experimental drug to see how the two drugs interact. Another vaccine experiment involves infecting beagle puppies with viruses by strapping containers full of “mutant” ticks to their bare skin, sometimes with pain relief intentionally withheld.

White Coat Waste, a watchdog to end US taxpayer-funded animal experiments, says the NIH should shut down these laboratories.

“Animal tests are bad spending and bad science, 95% of drugs tested on animals fail in human trials. The NIH’s April announcement does not include any spending cuts, deadlines or benchmarks. The rhetoric doesn’t match reality right now,” said WCW’s senior vice-president, Justin Goodman.

The NIH is the primary medical research authority in the US and the world’s biggest funder of animal research, spending an estimated $20bn annually. Yet Donald Trump proposes to slash the NIH budget by 40% to $27bn next year.

“Trump hates waste and animal experimentation is the poster child for wasteful spending. The best place to start would be to cut funding for animal labs which make up 40% of the NIH budget. It’s outdated, expensive, there’s little return for taxpayers and the American people don’t want pets tortured,” Goodman says.

Despite the cuts, in a move welcomed by Goodman as “encouraging”, the acting NIH deputy director, Dr Nicole Kleinstreuer, said in an NIH podcast last week that dog and cat tests were “unconscionable” and has pledged to phase them out.

“I don’t think we should do research on dogs and cats. Absolutely not. We are constrained under the law to leave those existing grants in place, for now, but to phase them out, we are working tirelessly behind the scenes,” Kleinstreuer said.

An NIH spokesperson told the Guardian that to support the organization’s “shift toward human-focused research, all future funding announcements will emphasize human-relevant data such as clinical trials and real-world data, and new approach methods (NAMs) such as advanced laboratory-based methods and AI-driven tools”.

“NIH will no longer issue Notice of Funding announcements exclusively for animal models, and some may exclude animal use entirely advancing science that directly benefits human health,” they continued.

The NIH plans to reduce animal research by establishing a new office of research innovation, validation and application (Oriva) to develop and expand NAMs. The NIH have also taken other significant steps away from animal research recently, including “terminating funding at Harvard University for studies that included sewing the eyes of young monkeys shut” and closing NIH campus beagle labs.

The Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, which supports animal experimentation, has written to the NIH urging “caution against prematurely removing animal research from the scientific toolkit in lieu of approaches not yet ready to address important biomedical inquiries in full”.

Notably, the recent NIH announcements have been welcomed by many as “historic”.

Jarrod Bailey, the director of medical research at the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine told the Guardian that the NIH is “now leading the way in making research more humane and human-relevant, which will save millions of animal and human lives.

“Changing the way the NIH has operated for decades will take some time. We want to see the NIH delivering more in the coming months, but the significant shift away from animal experiments are unprecedented and very encouraging,” he said.

Oriva is part of a broader federal trend in the US. The FDA has also published a roadmap to end animal experiments in preclinical safety studies.