NAMs and the Funding Frontier: How Modern Toxicology Maximizes Scientific Return on Investment
By Zachary Liebowitz | May 22nd, 2025
In an era where research budgets are shrinking and the need for smarter, faster science is growing, New Approach Methodologies (NAMs) are proving to be both innovative and economically strategic. While NAMs are frequently praised for their ethical and scientific benefits, their financial efficiency may be one of the most persuasive reasons for their adoption across research institutions, regulatory agencies, and industry. As toxicology enters the 21st century, the integration of NAMs not only improves how we assess chemical risks but has the potential to transform how we allocate funding in science.
Cost Efficiency Without Compromise
Animal-based toxicity testing is known for being costly and time-consuming, often involving significant financial resources and long study durations. Part of these costs are due to the regulations and policies that set standards for animal care and the need to review animal protocols and inspect the areas where animals live. In contrast, many NAMs—such as in vitro assays or computational models—can deliver results much more quickly and with considerably lower investment, making them more accessible and efficient for a wide range of research applications.
These cost savings aren’t marginal—they represent a fundamental shift in how toxicological science can be conducted.
The National Academies' 2017 report, Using 21st Century Science to Improve Risk-Related Evaluations, found that integrating NAMs into chemical risk assessments could significantly cut both cost and time, while improving relevance to human biology. A 2009 Nature article, "Toxicology for the twenty-first century," similarly emphasized the value of high-throughput and ‘omics-based methods in reducing testing costs and increasing data depth.
Importantly, many NAMs also reduce infrastructure and maintenance costs. Cell-based assays, microfluidic platforms, and computational pipelines can be run in smaller labs without the space and care requirements that animal housing and handling demand. That opens the door for more efficient academic labs and start-ups, and opportunities to participate in research traditionally limited to institutions with large animal facilities.
Faster Data = Faster Decisions
Delays in regulatory decision-making can translate into prolonged exposure to hazardous chemicals or delays in getting safer products to market. Traditional toxicology methods are part of the bottleneck. NAMs can help fix that broken pipeline. Programs like the EPA's ToxCast and the interagency Tox21 initiative show that it is possible to screen thousands of chemicals across hundreds of biological targets within months, not years.
This speed does not just benefit regulators. Industries looking to innovate rely on fast turnaround times to meet development timelines. With NAMs, a company can identify toxicity risks earlier in the pipeline and avoid the financial fallout of late-stage failures. Faster screening also allows researchers to prioritize chemicals for further investigation, making risk assessment more responsive and better aligned with real-world needs.
Additionally, the data generated by NAMs are often digitally structured and easily sharable, which facilitates smoother communication between scientists, regulatory agencies, and stakeholders. As a result, decision-making potentially will be more transparent.
Multipurpose, Modular, and Scalable
NAMs aren’t just faster—they’re also more flexible. Modern testing platforms can be applied to multiple types of toxicological evaluations. For example, transcriptomics might help characterize both endocrine and neurotoxic effects. Similarly, microphysiological systems like "organs-on-chips" can simulate human-relevant responses for a range of endpoints without additional animal use.
This modularity makes NAMs especially attractive from a budget standpoint. Rather than funding a different animal study for each toxicological endpoint, one NAM platform can generate insights across multiple domains. This also makes it easier to integrate results into Next-Generation Risk Assessment (NGRA) frameworks and promote greater data reuse across regulatory submissions.
When testing platforms are scalable, funding goes even further. High-throughput systems allow for the simultaneous evaluation of many chemicals, meaning a single grant or contract can yield exponentially more data points. For agencies managing thousands of chemicals with limited resources, this capability is crucial.
Better Alignment with Emerging Funding Priorities
Government agencies are increasingly looking for opportunities to incorporate NAMs. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has unveiled a comprehensive roadmap to reduce and eventually replace animal testing in drug development by integrating New Approach Methodologies (NAMs). This initiative, announced in April 2025, marks a significant shift toward more human-relevant, ethical, and efficient preclinical testing methods. The NIH’s NIEHS continues to fund projects focused on non-animal methods, and the FDA’s SMART Initiative aims to modernize toxicology through tools like high-content screening and computational modeling. The EPA has also committed to phasing out certain animal tests in favor of approaches validated through ToxCast and related platforms.
Recent announcements reinforce these trends. In April 2025, the NIH launched a major agency-wide initiative to prioritize human-based research technologies, creating a new Office of Research Innovation, Validation, and Application (ORIVA) to coordinate the development and adoption of non-animal models. This includes increasing funding opportunities for organoids, tissue chips, computational approaches, and patient-derived data. NIH is also working to eliminate bias in grant reviews that historically favored animal-based proposals and will publicly report on funding shifts to track progress.
The EPA’s 2024 NAMs Conference similarly highlighted the agency’s dedication to reducing vertebrate animal testing through cross-agency collaboration, expanded use of exposure NAMs, and investment in technologies like in vitro to in vivo extrapolation (IVIVE). The conference emphasized the federal commitment to building robust NAMs infrastructure across research domains.
In this environment, proposals that demonstrate the ability to use NAMs to produce high-quality, reproducible data quickly and affordably stand out. Funders are not only looking for scientific merit—they are also scrutinizing value and feasibility. NAMs answer all three.
Conclusion: A Smarter Investment
NAMs represent a turning point not just in how we assess toxicity, but in how we think about scientific return on investment. They can speed up timelines, reduce unnecessary spending, and yield data that is often more relevant to human health than traditional models.
As funding agencies look for ways to stretch every research dollar and maximize impact, NAMs provide a clear path forward. The scientific community is now recognizing that ethics, innovation, and efficiency can—and should—go hand-in-hand. Investing in NAMs is more than a shift in testing methods; it is a move toward an agile, transparent, and economically sustainable future for toxicology.
They are not just a modern alternative—they are a necessary evolution in cost-effective, science-driven toxicology.
Work Cited
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (2017). Using 21st Century Science to Improve Risk-Related Evaluations. https://doi.org/10.17226/24635
Hartung, T. (2009). Toxicology for the twenty-first century. Nature, 460(7252), 208–212. https://doi.org/10.1038/460208a
EPA ToxCast Program. https://www.epa.gov/chemical-research/toxicity-forecasting
The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Johns Hopkins University or Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
