Our 2-day Science+ meeting was an exceptional experience. We were deeply honoured to have so many outstanding speakers, panellists and chairs, which made for riveting discussions and new insights for all.
US FDA Commissioner Dr Martin Makary joined us virtually to talk about modernisation at the FDA, including the move away from animal models to more predictive human-relevant methods. Italy’s Minister of Health spoke about the revolutionary potential of AI and imaging for the future of health care. Professor Denis Noble’s explanation of why we need to rewrite the biology textbooks was a highlight of the meeting.
The meeting was perfectly timed, hot on the heels of strategies from both the UK and US governments to move towards human-focused research, while phasing out the use of animals. Numerous participants described human-based New Approach Methods (NAMs) that they have devised and shown to enable the discovery of efficacious and safe medicines at an equivalent or higher accuracy to animal studies. It was agreed that a realistic and achievable goal is now to devise and implement human NAM-based workflows that can be used in place of animal studies (in many areas), to improve the efficiency and safety of drug development.
Achieving this goal will require major international and cross-disciplinary collaboration. Clinicians, policy makers, social scientists, philosophers, regulators and scientists in academia and industry will be needed. Our meeting was a microcosm of this alliance, with an extraordinary breadth of perspectives in the room and consequently energising discussions and suggestions for solutions.
According to the brilliant Professor Blanca Rodriguez, “hybrid human-based in vitro / in silico systems are ready in many areas. What we now need are the right incentives, regulatory pathways, resources, and training programmes to accelerate uptake…. Human-focused life sciences are moving from vision to implementation.”
The meeting was live-streamed and recorded and we will post the link here as soon as it becomes available at https://royalsociety.org/science-events-and-lectures/2026/02/life-sciences/