SCIENTISTS in Scotland have been given almost £1 million to develop techniques to cut down on the use of animal testing in research.
The money has been granted to three projects at Scottish research institutes aiming to reduce the need to use creatures such as mice and fish to develop treatments for disease.
The grants were announced as new Home Office figures revealed that 3.6
million scientific procedures were carried out on animals during 2009.
This was a 1 per cent drop on the year before, but still meant that 2.6 million mice were used in experiments, 3,644 macaque monkeys, 619 marmosets and tamarins, 19,000 guinea pigs and 38,000 sheep.
The National Centre for the Replacement, Refinement and Reduction of Animals in Research (NC3Rs), funded by the government and the private sector, yesterday awarded almost £1m to schemes in Scotland to try to reduce the use of animals in research.
A team led by Dr Peter Hohenstein at the Medical Research Council Human Genetics Unit in Edinburgh was given £430,000. It is carrying out research into how to reduce the number of mice used in complex genetic experiments.
In the past decade, the use of genetically-modified mice has become standard practice to study disease and test drugs in many research institutes. However, this has seen the number of mice killed in experiments rocket - by 210,000, or 9 per cent, over the past year alone.
The scientists point out that one reason for the increase is because that in more complex experiments, most mice that are modified do not turn out to have the genetic make-up required for the tests, so are immediately culled without being used.
The Edinburgh scientists are hoping to overcome this problem by developing a technique to use embryonic stem cells to create mice that have all the mutations required, so that all those born are actually used.
Dr Hohenstein said: "You get a situation where something like 90 per cent of animals do not have all the mutations that you need, so they are basically useless.
"They are killed as soon as they are born. We are hoping to be able to come to a situation where we no longer have all that wastage."
Professor Christopher Secombes, a leading fish biologist at the University of Aberdeen, was awarded £157,000 to find new ways to test vaccines used to protect farmed fish from disease, without the need to use fish.
And a team from the University of Glasgow is trying to work out how to use cells from fly intestines instead of mice to carry out tests for how to treat colorectal cancer. It was given £350,528 to fund the research.
NC3Rs chief executive Dr Vicky Robinson said: "In recent years, the number of animals used for experiments has increased and now is an especially important time to be looking at ways to bring the numbers down.
