Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what recent steps she has taken to reduce the use of dogs for research purposes.

The NC3Rs has recently launched a £2.6 million call for the development of a virtual dog for assessing the safety of new medicines during drug development. The call is part of the NC3Rs CRACK IT Challenges competition and aims to build virtual canine tissues and organs using advanced computational and mathematical modelling approaches, ultimately to help replace the use of dogs. The Challenge builds on an international project led by the NC3Rs that has demonstrated that there are opportunities to use one rather than the standard two species for some studies in drug development.