Contribution
It is important to make the case that this is not just about people being horrified by the cruelty involved. It is also about the fact that the tests have been proven in so many cases not to be effective, not to yield useful results and not to be the best way to make progress in medical discoveries. My hon. Friend the Member for North Ayrshire and Arran mentioned a couple of those points.
On the point about conflicts with commercial consideration, the reason why MBR Acres put pressure on the Government and wanted to quell protests is that it is under some pressure: my understanding is that it is struggling to find customers and homes for its beagles because of the protests and the fact that people have quite rightly been horrified that tests are continuing. Where does that commercial pressure sit against the Government’s stated desire to adopt the three Rs, and the measures to reduce the use of animals in experiments set out in the animal welfare strategy and road map? How do we make sure that the Government’s stated intentions prevail over the commercial considerations?
On a more positive note, it is encouraging to see the progress that is being made on NAMs, and the Government throwing their weight behind that with £75 million for the new UK centre for the validation of alternative methods. I was particularly interested to hear what my hon. Friend the Member for North Ayrshire and Arran said about the potential for using AI to help to replace animal testing. She mentioned the AnimalGAN software being developed by the FDA in the US, which could be used to determine how rats would react to chemicals without having to do new tests, and the Virtual Second Species challenge to create an AI-powered virtual dog, trained on historic dog tests, which sounds fantastic.
In the strategy on replacing animals in science, the Government committed to setting up a new animal research institute that will
“bring together data, AI, cell engineering, genomic technology and cutting-edge disease modelling capabilities to generate collaborative research at scale”.
As I said, the University of Bristol was involved historically in the forced swim test. It is also at the forefront of AI innovation and research and was, as a result, chosen to host the Isambard-AI supercomputer, one of the fastest computers in the world. A very excited Secretary of State launched it in July last year; if the Minister has not yet had a chance to visit and learn about Isambard, there is an open invitation for him to do so.
We have been told that the supercomputer will spearhead scientific breakthroughs in, among other things, the discovery of new drugs. It could be used to analyse cell data, for advanced medical image modelling, for large-scale biostatistics on human data sets, for medical genetic modelling and for organ-on-a-chip simulations, which my hon. Friend the Member for North Ayrshire and Arran mentioned. In saying all that, my complete ignorance of these issues probably shines through, but it all sounds like it has huge potential, and there is already a huge amount of interest from researchers who want to use Isambard. I will follow up with the University of Bristol to ask whether anyone has approached it who wants to use it to research NAMs, and if so what priority the university will give to such usage.
There is great potential to use the super-brain in the computer. One reason why there are so many tests is that there is huge duplication and replication of tests, involving a huge number of animals. If we could use AI to number-crunch some of that, we could reduce the numbers in leaps and bounds, so I hope the university will get involved in the new institute. I hope the Minister can say a little more about whether he thinks AI is the way forward to help to bring down the number of animal tests significantly.