NCI Will Require Public Justification of Animal Model Use in Proposal Abstracts

By: Galen Cobb
Wednesday, August 12, 2026
On August 4, National Cancer Institute (NCI) Director Anthony Letai, MD, PhD, announced a new requirement for grant applications proposing animal studies. Starting October 5, 2026, applications submitted to NCI using animal models must include a brief, one to two sentence justification explaining why animal use is necessary and why alternatives are inadequate. This justification must appear in the application's Abstract, which National Institutes of Health RePORTER makes publicly searchable, rather than in the Vertebrate Animal Section, which is not public.

Applications must also describe a plan to validate animal findings in a human model, such as organoids, biopsy samples, or patient-derived xenografts, citing persistent gaps in translating animal results to human disease. Dr. Letai emphasized that investigators should select the model best suited to their scientific question rather than defaulting to familiar methods.