🚨 NIH and HHS have announced major steps to reduce the use of animals in federally funded research. Today, @NIH and the @HHSGov unveiled new initiatives that expand investment in human-based science while addressing animal use across the biomedical research enterprise. ⬇️ Expand for the key developments.

See the @NIH announcement here: nih.gov/news-events/news-rel…

100% of therapies developed specifically for sepsis have failed in human clinical trials. In our newest reflection, Gabby Vidaurre, PhD examined why this failure persists and what she learned while presenting a sepsis-specific version of our Research Modernization NOW roadmap at the @ShockSociety's 49th Annual Conference on Shock. Her presentation outlined practical steps to shift funding and research toward human-based approaches for sepsis. The conference showcased some exciting human-relevant science, but most non-clinical presentations at the conference still involved experiments on animals, including studies that already incorporated extensive human data. There's a familiar pattern here: animal experiments often remain embedded in the research pipeline because they are expected, not because they are necessary. Dr. Vidaurre's reflection also addresses one of the most common arguments for continuing experiments on animals in sepsis research: that the disease requires a "whole-body" model.

Two recent studies highlight how human-based models are opening new windows into how cancer spreads. 1⃣ At @wiscorthopedics and @stempharm, Joydeb Majumder, @BillMurphyUW et al. developed hiPSC-derived planar neural organoids to model melanoma brain metastasis using patient-derived melanoma cells. They note that "the results obtained from the orthotopic animal models cannot always be applied to humans due to the interspecies differences." Their 3D neural tissue model incorporated neural, vascular, and immune components, allowing them to observe how melanoma cells interact with human brain-like tissue, alter neurovascular signaling, trigger inflammatory responses, and respond to therapies. Melanoma growth in the human organoids differed substantially from conventional 2D cultures and showed features more consistent with human cancer biology. 2⃣ At @ColumbiaBME, @ChramiecAlan, @GVNlab et al. created a vascularized multi-organ "metastasis-on-a-chip" platform linking engineered human bone and lung tissues. Commenting editor Molly Ogle noted: "Preclinical xenograft models fail to fully replicate the human tissue niche to interrogate this process." This new system enabled them to track circulating breast cancer cells as they crossed blood vessel barriers, colonized specific organs, remodeled their microenvironments, and established premetastatic niches. It also reproduced clinically relevant differences between bone-tropic and lung-tropic cancer cells. 🚀 Platforms like these can help uncover mechanisms that have remained confounded by experiments on animals and provide new opportunities for studying disease biology in humans.