Why We Exist

Animal Reduction

Reducing animal use in research is no longer just an ethical aspiration — it is the explicit, documented direction of the agencies that govern preclinical science. We built our platform so that any lab, running any behavioral assay, can move in that direction without giving up statistical power.

How the Platform Enables It Virtual Control Groups →

The Direction Is Set

Regulators have converged:
fewer animals, and prove you tried.

Over the past few years, the institutions that fund, review, and regulate preclinical research have moved animal reduction from principle to policy. The facts, from the public record:

FDA Modernization Act 2.0 (2022)

Signed into law in December 2022, it amended the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act so that nonclinical testing for new drugs is no longer required by statute to be animal-based. Sponsors may support applications with alternatives — cell-based assays, microphysiological systems, and computational models — where those methods are scientifically appropriate.

FDA's NAMs roadmap (2025)

In April 2025, the FDA announced a roadmap to reduce animal testing in preclinical safety studies, beginning with monoclonal antibody therapies, and committed to encouraging submission of New Approach Methodology (NAM) data. The agency also operates qualification pathways — such as the ISTAND pilot program — through which novel drug development tools, including AI-based tools, can be formally evaluated for regulatory use.

NIH (2025)

The NIH announced an initiative to prioritize human-based research technologies and established a dedicated office (ORIVA — the Office of Research Innovation, Validation, and Application) to coordinate the development, validation, and scaling of NAMs across the agency. Long before that, US animal-welfare policy already required investigators to justify their numbers: PHS Policy obliges every funded protocol to state the approximate number of animals and the rationale for it, and USDA regulations require a written narrative showing alternatives were considered for any procedure that may cause more than momentary pain or distress — requirements every IACUC enforces today.

EMA and the EU (ongoing)

In the European Union, the 3Rs — Replacement, Reduction, Refinement — are not guidance but law: Directive 2010/63/EU makes them binding on all animal research and names full replacement as the ultimate goal. The EMA supports 3Rs implementation across its scientific guidelines, and the European Commission has committed to developing a roadmap toward phasing out animal testing in chemical safety assessments.

The pattern across all of it: agencies are no longer merely permitting reduction — funders now score human relevance, EU law mandates the 3Rs, and every protocol must justify its animal numbers. The question facing every lab has shifted from whether to reduce to how.

An honest note: None of the above is a claim about us. Virtual Labs' tools have not been qualified, endorsed, or accepted by the FDA, EMA, NIH, or any regulatory or ethics body, and nothing on this page implies otherwise. What the public record establishes is the direction of travel. Meeting it is work — measurement work, validation work, statistics work. That work is what this company does.

The Hard Truth

There's no easy way
to use fewer animals.

Behavioral studies don't use the animal numbers they do out of habit. They use them because behavioral measurement has historically been noisy — hand-scored, rig-dependent, lab-specific — and the only defense against noisy measurement is more animals. Every unblinded scoring session, every apparatus quirk, every un-recorded environmental variable widens the error bars, and widened error bars demand larger groups.

That means the real path to reduction isn't exhortation. It's engineering: make the measurement better, and the statistics let you ethically run fewer animals. Cut group sizes without fixing measurement first, and you don't get reduction — you get underpowered studies, which waste every animal enrolled in them. An underpowered study is the least ethical use of an animal there is.

This is the version of animal reduction we're committed to: the kind that makes the science stronger, not weaker.

Scientific Consensus

The field agrees.

The scientists who know the brain best are also the most clear-eyed about the limits of our ability to model it.

Bryan Roth, MD, PhD — UNC Chapel Hill
Inventor of DREADD technology and Director of the NIMH Psychoactive Drug Screening Program. His tools for studying circuit–behavior relationships were designed specifically for living animals — because that is the only place where behavior exists. The field's most powerful circuit tools are themselves an argument for better animal models, not fewer.1
Karl Deisseroth, MD, PhD — Stanford University
Inventor of optogenetics, the technology that has transformed our understanding of neural circuits. By design, optogenetics requires an intact, behaving animal — because the phenomena it is built to study only exist in a living, integrated nervous system. The tool itself is an argument about the current limits of alternatives.2
74 Neuroscientists — Neuron, 2021
In a formal position paper published in Neuron, seventy-four leading neuroscientists from institutions worldwide argued that "for neuroscience research, until viable and translational alternatives become available and the value of these alternatives has been proven, the use of animals should not be compromised." Signatories included researchers from Oxford, Harvard, the Weizmann Institute, and dozens of other major research institutions.3
Thomas Insel, MD — Former Director, NIMH
As NIMH Director, Insel identified the "paucity of predictive animal models" as a — if not the — central reason pharmaceutical companies retreated from psychiatric drug development. His response was not to abandon animal models but to develop better ones: the RDoC (Research Domain Criteria) framework was built precisely to improve the biological validity of both human and animal research in psychiatry.4
European Brain Council — Official Position
"In the absence of scientifically valid methods that can replace particular animal procedures, phasing out the use of animals in medical research would have major consequences and impact the quest to improve the quality of life of the many citizens affected by brain conditions, neurological and mental alike."5
Society for Neuroscience — Official Position
The Society for Neuroscience — over 30,000 members worldwide — formally supports the responsible and ethical use of animals in research where necessary to advance understanding of the brain, adopting the PHS Policy and the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals as its official standard, alongside its animal-welfare commitments.6
Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS) — 2022
Europe's largest neuroscience federation, representing over 20,000 researchers, stated in a formal 2022 commentary: "Alternative approaches in vitro will not be able to adequately and sufficiently replace all animal models in any foreseeable future." The reason is fundamental: in vitro models "do not exhibit behaviour, making it virtually impossible to simulate or emulate the complexity of the nervous system without studying a living animal."7
Frank Winkler, MD — Heidelberg University / 2025 Brain Prize Laureate
2025 Brain Prize winner and Professor of Experimental Neurooncology at Heidelberg. On the question of alternatives: "We don't do animal testing because we are stubborn. We actively look for alternatives and use them. But some relationships can only be properly understood in animals […]" On translational necessity: "Animal testing can be used, for example, to find out: If I administer a substance, does it really reach the brain and have an effect there? No other model can really do that very well."8

From Any Assay You Already Run

Reduction, engineered — starting with
the assays you already run.

1. Standardization

Measurement that varies between labs, rigs, and scorers can't be pooled — and data that can't be pooled must be re-collected, animal by animal. PolarEye generates contrast through physics, identical across sessions and sites; MouseOS emits one standardized, versioned schema from any video — whether it came from our hardware or the camera you already own. Standardized data is reusable data, and reusable data is the raw material of reduction.

2. Automation

Automated, consistent scoring removes the human variability that inflates group sizes, and it never gets tired, biased, or bored. It also extracts more information per animal — continuous measures instead of endpoint snapshots — so each animal enrolled contributes more evidence. More evidence per animal is reduction by another name.

3. Statistics

Tighter measurement means tighter variance estimates, honest power analyses, and group sizes justified by data rather than by tradition. Every analysis on the platform ships with the quality metrics and provenance a reviewer — or an IACUC — can inspect. Better baselines and better power calculations are the most immediate, least glamorous, most real reduction tool in science.

4. The Virtual Control Group path

For the most standardized, most replicated assays, the destination is a control arm built from data rather than from animals — validated against live cohorts, calibrated to your lab, adopted assay by assay. That work is underway now with early validation partners. Full science narrative: Virtual Control Groups →

No new protocol. No new apparatus.
Reduction starts with the assay — and the videos — you already have.

Where We Stand

Reduce and Refine now.
Replace, earned.

Reduce

Better measurement → better statistics → smaller, fully powered groups; standardized data → pooled baselines → the Virtual Control Group path. This is where our platform acts today.

Refine

Automated capture means less handling, and face-based identification means no ear notching, no tail marking, minimal handling stress. Continuous home-cage observation replaces stress-inducing test sessions where the science allows.

Replace

The ultimate goal — ours and, in the EU, the law's.9 We won't pretend it's close: a complete computational model of even the mouse brain does not exist.710 But every standardized experiment analyzed on the platform builds the dataset that makes progressively more ambitious modeling possible. That is the long game, and we're playing it honestly. The full argument: Our Mission →

Your reduction strategy shouldn't
cost you statistical power.

If your institution, funder, or ethics committee is asking how you'll use fewer animals, we'd like to show you an answer built on measurement, not hope.

Talk to a Scientist Explore Virtual Control Groups

References & Further Reading

1 Roth, B.L. (2016). DREADDs for Neuroscientists. Neuron, 89(4), 683–694. doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2016.01.040 — Foundational paper on chemogenetic tools designed for intact, behaving animals; illustrates why circuit–behavior research requires living organisms.
2 Deisseroth, K. (2015). Optogenetics: 10 years of microbial opsins in neuroscience. Nature Neuroscience, 18(9), 1213–1225. doi:10.1038/nn.4091 — Optogenetics requires intact neural circuits and behaving animals by design; illustrates why the field's most powerful circuit-analysis tools presuppose in vivo research.
3 Homberg, J.R. et al. (74 co-authors). (2021). The continued need for animals to advance brain research. Neuron, 109(15), 2374–2379. doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2021.07.015 — Formal position paper by seventy-four neuroscientists worldwide arguing that animal use in neuroscience "should not be compromised" until viable translational alternatives have been proven.
4 Brady, L.S. & Insel, T.R. (2012). Translating discoveries into medicine: psychiatric drug development in 2011. Neuropsychopharmacology, 37(1), 281–283. doi:10.1038/npp.2011.106 — Source of the "paucity of predictive animal models" assessment; and Insel, T.R. et al. (2010). Research domain criteria (RDoC): toward a new classification framework for research on mental disorders. American Journal of Psychiatry, 167(7), 748–751. — The RDoC framework, developed to improve the biological validity of psychiatric research.
5 European Brain Council. Statement on Animal Research. braincouncil.eu — "The European Brain Council Launches Statement on Animal Research"; official EBC position on the consequences of phasing out animal research before scientifically valid replacements exist.
6 Society for Neuroscience. Policies on the Use of Animals and Humans in Neuroscience Research. sfn.org/advocacy/policy-positions — SfN's formal position supporting the responsible and ethical use of animals in research where necessary to advance understanding of the brain, adopting the PHS Policy and the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals as its official standard.
7 Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS). (2022). FENS commentary on calls to phase out animal experiments. fens.org — Official FENS position: in vitro alternatives "will not be able to adequately and sufficiently replace all animal models in any foreseeable future" because they do not exhibit behaviour.
8 Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS). (2026). The winners of the 2025 Brain Prize acknowledge animal research as essential. fens.org — Frank Winkler, MD, 2025 Brain Prize laureate: "We don't do animal testing because we are stubborn. We actively look for alternatives and use them. But some relationships can only be properly understood in animals […]"
9 Russell, W.M.S. & Burch, R.L. (1959). The Principles of Humane Experimental Technique. Methuen, London. — Origin of the 3Rs framework (Replacement, Reduction, Refinement); names replacement as the ultimate goal of humane experimental technique.
10 Neziri, B. et al. (2024). Animal models in neuroscience with alternative approaches: Evolutionary, biomedical, and ethical perspectives. Animal Models and Experimental Medicine. doi:10.1002/ame2.12487 — Contemporary review of animal models and alternative approaches in neuroscience, including the state and limits of replacement.