News on non-animal methods
MARCH 09 - 13, 2026
NEWS, REPORTS & POSITION STATEMENTS
1. Global community effort to shape new AI-ready datasets and evaluations for Antimicrobial Resistance Research
The Align Foundation, a nonprofit accelerating predictive biology by convening the world’s leading minds to generate and optimize the data that powers AI breakthroughs, announced a partnership with Google DeepMind, the world’s leading AI lab, to work with the global community to chart a new roadmap for data and evaluations that can help drive AI for AMR (Antimicrobial Resistance) research.
Building on the calls to action within the AI for AMR report released by Google DeepMind and the Fleming Initiative, the organizations will convene global experts in microbiology, medicine, and AI to define and prioritize data generation. Resulting datasets will enable the development of “dream models”– predictive systems capable of catalyzing field-wide changes in how the world understands, predicts, and ultimately addresses AMR.
2. BEACON launches to unite AI benchmarking across biology and drug discovery
A new international consortium, BEACON (Benchmarking, Evaluation, and Assessment Consortium for Science), has been launched by CASP, DREAM, OpenADMET, Sage Bionetworks, and CACHE/Conscience to foster synergies, align and expand benchmarking efforts across AI-driven biology and medicine.
The initiative brings together established critical assessment groups and open science organizations to develop shared evaluation standards, run community challenges, and create an open platform for validating predictive models in disease research and small-molecule discovery. BEACON is developing a structured framework to assess how computational methods perform in complex and emerging biological systems, with the aim of improving research reproducibility in AI-driven science and promoting methodological clarity.
3. How can individual pharmaceutical companies support the phasing-in of new non-animal methods?
The transition to non-animal science is a significant and complex challenge. Whilst the pharmaceutical sector has announced various ambitions, commitments, important initiatives and progress, some individual companies may find it difficult to determine exactly how they can best contribute, and where to begin. Over the past 18 months, the RSCPA has collaborated with pharmaceutical companies (in particular Novo Nordisk, Merck Group and Sanofi) to develop a resource outlining specific key actions, illustrated by examples of initiatives, that individual pharmaceutical companies can undertake to review their own current practices and further accelerate the transition towards non-animal science for the development and testing of pharmaceuticals.
Topics covered in the Action Plan are supported by EFPIA — European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations. In this complex area, the plan aims to facilitate a ‘what can we do?’ approach, aiming at complementing important initiatives such as the ‘Three Baskets’ approach developed by Merck.
4. PrecisionTox: How uniting human and environmental health under a “One Toxicology” framework
Today, especially after worldwide shutdowns caused by animal-borne infectious diseases, ‘One Health’ is often primarily associated with communicable disease management and agriculture, its original scope. However, according to the Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health, pollution is the world’s leading environmental risk factor for disease and early death, responsible for an estimated 9 million fatalities annually. Current strategies falter because they need to address the entire interconnected cycle, not just the human aspect or the environment individually. So, can we broaden One Health to genuinely provide comprehensive protection?
In a recent editorial John Colbourne (Birmingham University), Jonathan Freedman (IEHS), Laura Holden (Birmingham University) and Joseph Shaw (Indiana University) gathered to explore how uniting human and environmental health under a “One Toxicology” framework can transform chemical safety. Building on evolutionary principles and cross‑species evidence, the authors advocate for integrated approaches that address pollution’s rising risks, improve hazard assessment, and strengthen protections for all life sharing our interconnected planet.
5. OSOA: Building the regulatory backbone for NAMs
New Approach Methodologies (NAMs) are advancing quickly across toxicology. Yet their uptake in regulation remains uneven. In a recent post, Faizan Sahigara from CEHTRA explained why, while the barrier is often not science, but structure, the EU legislative framework OSOA (One Substance, On Assessment) offers an opportunity to shift this dynamic.
One Substance, One Assessment (OSOA) is a European Union initiative designed to ensure that each chemical substance is assessed only once for hazard and risk, with that assessment shared across all EU regulatory frameworks. Potential OSOA impact includes: Enabling a NAM accepted once to support multiple regulatory decisions; Reducing duplication of studies and limiting repeat animal testing; Supporting harmonised evaluation standards; Increasing confidence in integrated, non animal testing strategies. If implemented ambitiously, OSOA could become a structural catalyst for modern, animal free regulatory science in Europe.
INTERVIEWS, NOMINATIONS & AWARDS
6. Using AI to accelerate the discovery and design of therapeutic drugs: Interview with Prof. James J. Collins
James J. Collins is one of the founders of the field of synthetic biology, and is also a leading researcher in systems biology. His research has led to the development of new classes of diagnostics and therapeutics, including in the detection and treatment of pathogens like Ebola, Zika, SARS-CoV‑2, and antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Collins is a core faculty member of the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES), the director of the MIT Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health, as well as an institute member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and core founding faculty at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, Harvard.
In an interview published by MIT News, Professor Collins discusses how collaboration has been central to his research into combining computational predictions with new experimental platforms.
TOOLS, PLATFORMS, CALLS
7. 3RS Student grants 2026: call for submissions
The European Partnership for Alternative Approaches to Animal Testing (EPAA) supports students and young scientists with outstanding work in the field of alternative approaches to attend a high-profile scientific event. Costs linked to participation may prevent students with promising work or young scientists at the beginning of their careers from attending these events. The EPAA partners are therefore happy to sponsor the 3Rs Student grants to facilitate the participation of students and young scientists in such events.
In 2026, two full grants of 1000€ for SETAC Europe 2026, ESTIV 2026 and EUROTOX 2026 are available. While submissions for SETAC Europe closed in February, submissions for ESTIV and EUROTOX are still open.
Submission deadline for:
- ESTIV (Maastricht, the Netherlands, 29 June — 2 July 2026): 20 March 2026.
- EUROTOX (Vienna, Austria, 13 – 16 September 2026): 15 May 2026.
Check out our calls interface
INDUSTRY, BIOTECH & PARTNERSHIPS
8. Owkin x Consensus: To strengthen literature intelligence for Owkin’s AI Scientist, K Pro
Owkin, an AI company on a mission to build biological artificial superintelligence to cure diseases, announced a partnership with Consensus, the leading AI-powered research search engine, to bring 200 million peer-reviewed papers directly into Owkin’s AI Scientist for Biology, K Pro.
Consensus mitigates the risk of hallucination, guaranteeing every paper cited is real and every summary based on research. The integration is designed to support more precise scientific research workflows, complementing Owkin’s expertise in multimodal analysis and data-driven biology. Pascal Weinberger, Owkin’s Co-CEO said: “By combining Owkin’s agentic data driven approach to biological research with Consensus’s literature intelligence, we aim to help teams move faster from scientific question to evidence-based insight.”
9. Turbine’s first immunology partnership with a top 10 pharmaceutical company
Turbine announced a $25 million Series B financing, an expansion of its virtual cell platform across industries and a new immunology-focused partnership with a top 10 pharma company. The Series B round was led by Interactive Venture Partners, with participation from Beiersdorf AG and existing investors, including MSD Global Health Innovation, Accel and Mercia.
Turbine’s lab-in-the-loop will generate additional proprietary perturbation datasets, allowing the company to fine-tune its foundational virtual cell model to novel assay and tissue types. “Combination therapies have been proven to offer patient benefit. However, given the complexity of immunological diseases and the sheer number of potential combinations, virtualization is the only way scientists can rationally explore and identify the right drug combinations, as well as which patient cohorts may benefit from them.” said Szabolcs Nagy, Co-Founder & CEO at Turbine.
10. Bruker x Noetik: Advancing tissue foundational models for translational and therapeutic applications
Bruker Spatial Biology, a division of Bruker Corporation, announced that it will expand its collaboration with Noetik Inc., following their prior study of more than 3500 patient samples with the CosMx® Spatial Molecular Imager (SMI). CosMx SMI powers Noetik’s pre-training and scaling of bio-foundation models to perform complex genome-wide simulations of human cellular- and tissue-level biology to enable diverse therapeutics applications.
“Noetik’s multiple spatial AI models, including the Oncology Counterfactual Therapeutics Oracle virtual cell, which can simulate patient biology and inform drug discovery, represent transformative breakthroughs for tackling human disease,” said Dr. Mark R. Munch, President of the Bruker NANO Group. To develop self-supervised AI, Noetik leverages the CosMx SMI platform to generate the largest and most biologically complete single-cell and subcellular spatial transcriptomic and multiomic datasets in oncology.
SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERIES & PROTOCOLS
11. Breast cancer: Personalized PK/PD guided therapy via an iPSC – derived multi-organoid platform
Scientists from the Korea Research Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology (KRIBB) reported the development of a patient-specific, iPSC-derived multi-organ pharmacokinetics/pharmacodynamics (PK/PD) evaluation platform for NF1-mutant breast cancer. Composed of intestinal, liver, and kidney organoids, this multi-organoid system (Networking Organoid Culture System — NOCS) enabled individualized assessment of drug absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion.
Integrative genomic and pathway analyses uncovered therapeutic vulnerabilities, including responsiveness to a novel exon skipping therapy targeting NF1. The findings establish a clinically relevant framework that integrates multi-organ PK/PD modeling with genotype-driven therapeutic strategies, highlighting the potential of combining targeted gene correction with small-molecule therapy for personalized treatment.
Read the article in Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy
12. AOPGraphExplorer 2.0: Transforming AOP knowledge into interactive mechanistic insights
The Adverse Outcome Pathway (AOP) framework is a cornerstone of modern mechanistic toxicology, providing a structured representation of causal biological events linking molecular initiating events to adverse health outcomes. However, the practical exploration and interpretation of AOPs remain challenging due to the fragmentation of mechanistic knowledge across heterogeneous biological databases and the limited availability of integrated, interactive tools.
This preprint presents AOPGraphExplorer 2.0, an interactive graph-based platform for the visualization, annotation, and analysis of AOP networks derived from AOP-Wiki. This new version introduces a scalable, modular architecture that integrates multi-domain mechanistic annotations, including biological processes, molecular entities, anatomical context, diseases, and stressors, directly into AOP graphs. By bridging AOP-Wiki with external biomedical knowledge resources in a unified graph framework, AOPGraphExplorer 2.0 transforms AOP exploration into a multi-domain systems-level analysis workflow.
WORTH (RE)SHARING
Biotech Act — Commission adoption: Feedback period open until 02 May 2026
JRC study explores variety of innovation performances across EU regions
UPCOMING WEBINARS, WORKSHOPS, SYMPOSIA
R2N Symposium: Alternative and complementary methods for future-oriented biomedical research. March 17, 2026. Hannover Medical School (Germany)
SOT 65th Annual Meeting and ToxExpo. March 22 — 25, 2026. San Diego (USA)
CAAT x Evidence Based Toxicology Collaboration (EBTC) mixer / SOT 2026. March 23, 2026, 7:30pm PST, San Diego (USA)
