04.09.26
We are really excited to announce today, on World Leukaemia Day, a new 100% animal-free grant for leukaemia research.
The research grant, funded by The Humane Research Trust and with support from us, has been awarded to Dr Minerva Bosch-Fortea at Bart’s Cancer Institute. It will enable her to develop an animal-free model to study leukaemia progression in the bone marrow.
What is Leukaemia?
Leukaemia is a type of blood cancer that affects thousands of people- in the UK alone, around 10,000 cases are diagnosed every year. Despite the new treatments that have been made available, much more research is needed to learn about why leukaemia develops and why some treatments can stop working.
Research that impacts science and animals
Dr Bosch-Fortea’s research will use animal-free approaches to recreate the complicated environment inside bone marrow, where leukaemia cells can grow and develop. By studying leukaemia in this ‘animal-free model’, scientists hope to better understand what causes leukaemia to develop, and to help develop more treatments for this type of cancer.
An important moment for science.
There is a growing momentum for science to become more ‘human-relevant’, to be more specific to an individual person’s own biology.
Animal-free research can offer more reliable, human-specific results, and at the same time, replace the need for animal use in that area. Last year, Great Britain carried out hundreds of thousands of experiments on animals in laboratories, according to recent statistics. Dr Bosh-Fortea’s leukaemia research hopes to prevent the use of 400 mice a year throughout the five-year research program and aims to reduce the use of mice in this type of research by up to 80%.
These numbers show the very real impact animal-free research can have in avoiding animal use.
A partnership towards the future of animal-free research
The partnership between The Humane Research Trust and Naturewatch Foundation offers supporters of both charities the opportunity to play an important role in driving research that replaces animal testing, at the forefront of science.
For more information on the grant from The Humane Research Trust, check out their blog here.
