We endorse the Association of Medical Research Charities position statement on the use of animals in medical research, and as the scope of our research expands and moves closer to progressing potential treatments through to clinical trials, some of the research activities we fund now unavoidably involve mouse models and fruit fly models in order to fulfil current legislative requirements.
Wherever possible, we want the research that we fund at our dedicated Centres of Excellence to use human brain tumour tissue. Indeed we have proactively funded research into creating and sustaining animal-free research using models that only involve human brain tumour cells, donated through appropriate consent given by patients undergoing surgical procedures.
We also fund BRAIN UK at Southampton University, the country’s only national tissue bank providing crucial access to brain tumour samples for researchers from the archives of clinical neuroscience centres in the UK, effectively covering about 90% of the UK population, and an essential component in the fight to find a cure for brain tumours.