The Dr Hadwen Trust has revealed details of the ground breaking medical research projects it is funding this year, in diverse areas such as epilepsy, bone disease in childhood leukaemia, brain cell imaging, nanotoxicity testing and abdominal pain studies.
Through its work, the Dr Hadwen Trust is funding projects which develop more human relevant approaches using modern methods and replace the need for animal experiments, of which there were 3.6 million in 2009.

Home Office statistics released in July show that whilst overall numbers of experiments have fallen by 1%, and toxicology tests on animals in 2008-2009 dropped by 10%(1), disappointingly the number of new world primates used, such as marmosets and tamarins, rose by 90%(2).

Despite the fact that most scientists challenge the validity of animal models for medical research as they do not reliably mimic the human condition, the number of animal experiments carried out each year still remains high. By using existing...