A moonshot for animal-free European health research – POLITICO

The term ‘moonshot’ references the NASA moon missions of the 1960s, describing visionary, ambitious and innovative undertakings that redefined the boundaries of science and society. In recent times, it’s a phrase that the European Commission has used in the draft Horizon Europe 2028-2034 research initiative to describe building the Future Circular Collider or achieving commercial nuclear fusion.

What the phrase does not connote or encompass is the continuation of a status quo that fails to meet the needs of European citizens. As the Commission rightly points out, the EU is suffering from “an alarming failure to translate innovation into products or services”. This problem is particularly acute in the context of health research, an arena in which only a very small proportion of pre-clinical discoveries leads to actual advances for patients. This has been referred to as the “valley of death” in drug discovery, with an estimated 95 percent of promising drugs failing at clinical stage. A large percentage of this failure rate is a result of ‘animal models’ of human disease and toxicity that simply do not translate from the laboratory to human beings in the real world.

Achieving a high degree of translational relevance in biomedical models would be a true moonshot project, with its embrace of human biology as the new gold standard.

Achieving a high degree of translational relevance in biomedical models would be a true moonshot project, with its embrace of human biology as the new gold standard and a shift in research focus and funding to augment and enhance the existing toolbox of human-specific nonanimal methods (NAMs).