Virtual Control Groups · The Animal Reduction Strategy
Every behavioral study runs a control group — animals whose entire job is to behave normally. Virtual Control Groups synthesize that baseline from standardized behavioral data, so your animals go where they matter: the experimental arms. We're building it now, assay by assay, with early validation partners.
The Regulatory Moment
The agencies that govern preclinical research have converged on the same direction: use fewer animals, and prove you tried. New Approach Methodologies (NAMs) have moved from white papers to policy. The question for every lab is no longer whether to reduce — it's how, without giving up statistical power. The full regulatory landscape →
The FDA Modernization Act 2.0 and the agencies' New Approach Methodologies roadmaps point the same direction: fewer animals, with documented reduction strategies. A validated virtual control approach is a direct, quantifiable answer.
In April 2025 the FDA announced a roadmap to reduce animal testing in preclinical safety studies and encourages New Approach Methodology data — and its ISTAND program formally evaluates novel drug-development tools, including AI-based tools.
Replacement, Reduction, Refinement has guided ethics review for decades. Virtual Control Groups turn the middle R from an aspiration into a line item.
What Is a Virtual Control Group?
Control animals in well-established assays are the most predictable subjects in science — that predictability is the entire reason they're valid controls. Which makes them exactly what statistical models learn best.
A Virtual Control Group is a validated, assay-specific baseline synthesized from standardized recordings of normally behaving animals — matched to your assay, your apparatus, and your conditions, and calibrated against your own lab's data before it ever replaces a live cohort.
The statistician's first objection — batch effects, drift, non-contemporaneous controls — is the right one to raise. It's exactly why virtual baselines are calibrated against your lab's own contemporaneous data and validated side-by-side against live cohorts before ever replacing one.
You keep the statistical power. The animals stay out of the control arm.
Any Assay You Already Run
PolarEye automates capture and scoring for the behavioral assays you already run — with zero protocol change. Every standardized session strengthens the baseline for that assay. This is how virtual controls get built: one real experiment at a time.
Running something else? If it has a published protocol, we're interested. Ask about your assay →
How the Platform Enables It
Hand-scored video from unstandardized rigs can't train a control arm. A validated virtual baseline demands measurement you can trust — identical capture physics, identical schema, environment on the record. That's the entire design brief of our stack.
Contrast generated by physics, not post-processing. Illumination and imaging identical across sessions, sites, and time of day — with environmental conditions recorded alongside every session, so context is part of the dataset. Animals are identified by face: no ear notching, no tail marks, no RFID, minimal handling stress — identity travels with the data, not with a tag.
Every device emits one standardized schema — whether the video came from PolarEye or the camera you already own. Every instrument, one dataset, by design.
Assay-specific models learn what normal looks like, are calibrated against your lab's own historical controls, and are validated side-by-side with live cohorts before replacing one.
The metadata is what makes a virtual baseline defensible: light, sound, ultrasonic noise, and climate are logged with every session, so baselines are matched on context — not just on strain and assay — and unexpected variability has a place to be explained. See how we capture it →
The Payoff
A virtual baseline built from hundreds of standardized sessions carries statistical depth no 10-animal control cohort can match — at a fraction of the cost of housing, running, and scoring live controls.
Get There First
Virtual Control Groups are built on standardized data — and every session you capture is a head start. Talk to us about your assays, your reduction plan, and where virtual controls fit in your program.