Drug companies in the EU are increasingly turning to nonanimal strategies to test medicines, but the number of animals used for basic research is on the rise, according to statistics published 30 September by the European Commission.

Although the total number of animals used for scientific purposes in the EU's 27 member states has held steady at around 12 million per year, this overall figure masks shifting trends in animal experimentation. The European Commission report, which documents data submitted for 2008, shows that studies investigating basic biological principles used approximately 4.5 million research animals—up by more than half a million from 2005. In contrast, the number of animals used in the drug discovery pipeline for human and veterinary medicines dropped by more than a million to 2.7 million animals over the same period. Toxicology testing remained constant at about 1 million animals.

“What we're seeing at the moment is a steady increase in the number of animals that are genetically modified” for basic investigations, says Simon Festing, chief executive of Understanding Animal Research, a proresearch advocacy group in London. But he adds that at the same time “there is continued pressure, particularly in safety testing, to reduce the number of animals used. This can be achieved by new technologies, from computer simulations to stem cells.”

Thomas Hartung, director of the Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and former director of the European Centre for the Validation of Alternative Methods in Ispra, Italy, notes that pharma's move to alternative testing strategies has proven to be a boon for the industry. “This has helped the drug industry enormously to bring down their attrition rates” for investigational compounds put into clinical trials, he says.

Here's where Europe's 12 million animals are being used: