Accelerating adoption of 3Rs methods – Partnerships and Impact awards

Ensuring 3Rs approaches are shared across the wider community and adopted by researchers in both academia and industry is key to achieving sustained impacts and changes in animal use. These are exciting times for the 3Rs especially for the replacement of animals with advances in complex in vitro models and computational models. However, a number of barriers to adoption still remain, such as the need for additional resource to enable researchers to gain experience with 3Rs approaches alongside their current animal models in order to build confidence and capacity.

To help address these barriers, we have launched our new Partnerships and Impact awards building on the success and experience of our previous Skills and Knowledge Transfer scheme. The awards will support partnerships between developer(s) and new user(s) of a 3Rs approach to accelerate its transfer into a new research organisation and achieve an immediate 3Rs impact. While development of a tool or technology is not in scope, studies to build further confidence and demonstrate the approach is fit-for-purpose are encouraged as part of a proposal.

Awards are for up to 24 months with the amount requested dependent on the science and limited to a maximum of £200k (80% FEC). As part of our continued collaborations with Cancer Research UK and British Heart Foundation, additional joint awards are available for grants seeking to achieve a 3Rs impact within cancer or cardiovascular research fields, respectively. The budget for the 2024 call is £1.075M.

Further details on the scope and eligibility of the Partnerships and Impact awards can be found on the NC3Rs funding pages.