24th April was World Day for Laboratory Animals. Most of what you will have read that day would have focused on the ethical case for ending animal testing, and rightly so. But there’s another side to this story that doesn’t get told often enough: removing animal-derived components from testing doesn’t just reduce harm. It produces better science.
This is something we think about every day at XCellR8, and it’s worth explaining why.
Over-reliance on Fetal Bovine Serum
The majority of in vitro testing laboratories use foetal bovine serum (FBS) as a standard supplement in their cell culture media. It’s been the default for decades. FBS provides the growth factors, hormones and nutrients that cells need to survive and grow in culture, and most labs treat it as an unquestioned part of the process.
But there’s a fundamental problem with this approach. When you’re testing a product designed for human skin, the biological environment in the test system should reflect human biology. FBS doesn’t do that. It introduces bovine growth factors, bovine hormones and bovine proteins into the culture environment. Human cells respond to those signals, but the responses may not reflect what happens when the product meets actual human skin.
If you’re measuring whether a cosmetic ingredient boosts collagen production or protects cells from oxidative stress, you want to know what happens in a human-relevant environment, not what happens when human cells are bathed in signals from a different species. The gap between those two things is the gap between data that translates to real-world outcomes and data that may not.
Beyond the science, there are serious welfare concerns about FBS production. FBS is collected by cardiac puncture from bovine foetuses after their mothers are slaughtered. It is estimated that over one million foetuses are harvested annually worldwide for this purpose. As in vitro testing expands globally, demand for FBS continues to grow.
For companies positioning themselves as cruelty-free or vegan, it’s worth understanding that many in vitro tests performed on their behalf may still rely on these animal-derived materials. A test being “in vitro” does not automatically mean it is animal-free.
Our Approach
At XCellR8, we removed all animal-derived components from our testing methods. That includes FBS, bovine serum albumin, and any other animal-sourced materials. Where serum is needed, we use human serum, ensuring that cells receive biological signals from the right species. Across our safety and efficacy testing, the culture environment matches the biology of the people who will actually use the product.
The practical effect matters. Whether we’re assessing skin irritation, sensitisation, or generating data to support cosmetic claims, the test systems are designed around human biology from the outset. The data is more translatable to real-world outcomes because the conditions it was generated in more closely reflect what happens on human skin.
This is why animal-free and human-relevant aren’t two separate claims for us. They’re the same thing. Remove the animal-derived components and you automatically create a test environment that better reflects human biology.
Where the industry is heading
The UK government has committed to replacing animals in regulatory science. The EU is reviewing the Cosmetics Products Regulation. Across the industry, there is growing recognition that better testing means more human-relevant testing, and that the reliance on animal-derived materials is a limitation the sector needs to move beyond.
We’ve been doing this since 2008. For 18 years, every test we’ve developed has been completely free of animal-derived products. Not as a compromise, and not as a marketing position, but because it’s how you get data that is most relevant to humans.
World Day for Laboratory Animals may have passed for another year, but the questions it raises haven’t. The shift towards human-relevant, animal-free testing is gathering pace, and that’s good news for the science as much as the animals.
If you’d like to know more about how animal-free testing works in practice, or how it could apply to your products, we’d welcome the conversation. Get in touch at info@x-cellr8.com.
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