CN Bio has secured a £180,000 Innovate UK grant to develop a human-relevant workflow for pharmacokinetic studies that could help reduce the use of animals in drug development.

Project targets animal use in pharmacokinetic studies

The project is being funded in partnership with the National Centre for the Replacement, Refinement and Reduction of Animals in Research (NC3Rs) and supports the UK Government’s target to reduce dedicated pharmacokinetic studies using dogs and non-human primates by 35% by 2030.

Pharmacokinetic (PK) studies assess how a drug is absorbed, distributed, metabolised and eliminated by the body. Animal studies are widely used to generate PK data during drug development, but differences between animal and human biology can limit how accurately the results predict human outcomes.

CN Bio will use the grant to develop a workflow combining data from human multi-organ microphysiological systems (MPS) with physiologically based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) modelling.

The aim is to generate human-relevant information about drug behaviour and translate laboratory data into predictions that can be used during drug development.

Organ-on-a-chip technology combined with modelling

The project will build on CN Bio’s existing dual-organ Gut/Liver MPS, which recreates aspects of human tissue biology in an experimental system.

Researchers will use data generated by the system to derive pharmacokinetic parameters before integrating them into PBPK models.

The combined approach is intended to provide mechanistic information about drug disposition and produce predictions that can be interpreted in the context of human pharmacokinetics.

The project will also investigate adding a kidney model to the MPS platform.

A kidney component could allow researchers to assess renal clearance and other processes involved in drug excretion, expanding the range of pharmacokinetic processes that can be modelled within the system.

CN Bio will also explore the use of liquid-handling automation to improve the throughput and reproducibility of the workflow.

The company will work with contract research organisations to assess the technical and operational requirements needed for wider adoption.

UK aims to reduce animal testing in drug development

The project comes as the UK seeks to increase the use of new approach methodologies (NAMs) in biomedical research and drug development.

NAMs include laboratory-based human models and computational approaches designed to provide information that can reduce, refine or replace the use of animals in research.

CN Bio biology group leader Yassen Abbas said: “Understanding pharmacokinetics is crucial to determining a drug candidate’s efficacy and potential side effects, and this project represents a valuable new route to unlock earlier, human-relevant insights into drug disposition.”

The Innovate UK funding will support development and validation of the workflow rather than establish it as a validated replacement for animal PK studies.

If successful, the project could provide researchers with a standardised approach for combining human organ-on-a-chip data with computational PK modelling, potentially supporting earlier assessment of drug behaviour before animal studies are undertaken.

For pharmaceutical researchers, the potential benefit is not only a reduction in animal use but also access to data that more closely reflects human biology during the drug development process.