A €17.5m EU project is seeking to identify where pigs could replace monkeys in safety testing.

The NHPig project is a five-year partnership between public and private organisations, led by the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU), Germany, and Novo Nordisk, Denmark.

The project has received funding from the EU Innovative Health Joint Initiative Joint Undertaking (IHI JU) and will investigate where micro- and minipigs could be used in place of monkeys to assess the safety of potential therapies such as antibodies, small molecules and RNAs – therapeutic antibodies can be used as cancer treatments, for example (see also the EARA feature on antibodies).

Monkeys are currently essential for this purpose because of their close similarity to humans, however ‘when addressing such questions, experiments on pigs can certainly provide valid results’, said NHPig project co-ordinator Eckhard Wolf, at LMU, in a Q&A.

He cited a pig model within the consortium, which could be used to test antibody safety, as it does not mount an immune response against certain human antibodies and could therefore be a potentially better model than monkeys.

Another goal of the project is to develop substitute models that do not use animals altogether, such as pig cell cultures and other lab-based techniques (it is still not possible, however, to replace animals in many areas of safety testing – see the EARA feature).

The project involves 27 partner organisations, including EARA members KU Leuven and the University of Antwerp, both Belgium; Ellegaard Göttingen Minipigs, Denmark; Etisense, France, as well as Charles River Laboratories, GSK, Merck and Sanofi.

Commenting on the project, Corinne Simon, of Etisense, said the company was ‘proud to unveil its participation in the NHPig project, highlighting our commitment to innovation and collaboration’.