Durham University undertakes a broad range of projects involving animals, including licensed, laboratory based research and observational research. Examples of our research involving animals are below, together with some of our policies which illustrate our commitment to the principles of reduction, replacement and refinement in animal research. You can also find information about our licensed research on our non-technical summaries page.
The professionally staffed laboratory animal facility at Durham University has introduced introduced a range of policies to enhance the welfare of animals in its care. Durham is committed to the principles of the ‘3Rs’ (reduction, replacement and refinement), which collectively aim to ensure that the use of animals in research is kept to a minimum, and that high standards of welfare are in place where it is necessary for animals to be involved. These policies reflect best practices within the sector and support the principle of ‘Refinement’ which focuses on minimising pain and suffering and improving welfare. Practices such as single use of hypodermic needles have been introduced to minimise any possible pain during procedures. Our environmental enrichment practices are designed to support the best possible quality of life for animals resident in the unit, though housing animals in social groups or pairs where safe to do so, and providing other forms of stimulation within their cages.
Single use needles policy
Environmental enrichment
Our researchers use and help to develop techniques that mean more information can be collected using fewer animals, thereby reducing the number of animals used in research and improving data quality.
This includes designing behavioural studies where the same animal can be studied under different conditions, instead of using multiple animals, and improving techniques that allow us to collect more effective data. All such research is carried out under approved Home Office licences, which are scrutinised to ensure that high standards of animal welfare are maintained.
The data we gather in this way helps us to better understand what factors affect behaviour, for example by increasing understanding of the function of different parts of the brain. This knowledge can then inform developments such as improved diagnostic tools and treatments for psychological conditions and diseases such as Alzheimer’s.
One way we reduce the number of animals used is by collecting more comprehensive data from each animal, minimising the number needed for robust conclusions. For example, to study how brain activity affects psychological processes, researchers sometimes use controlled stimulation of specific brain regions during a number of behavioural procedures. These techniques allow us to isolate particular psychological functions and rule out alternative reasons for changes in behaviour. Researchers with expertise in different behavioural procedures work together to design procedures which will maximise the amount of data that can be obtained from a single animal. By increasing the data obtained from each animal, fewer animals are needed per experiment. It also improves data reliability by controlling for differences between animals, meaning that we can be confident that changes in behaviour are not simply due to differences between individual animals.
Improvements in technology – and our use of that technology – also contribute to reducing the number of animals used. New technologies greatly increase the amount of data we can gather when recording brain activity, while adjustments to how we use the tools available mean that we can generate the same amount of data from one animal that would previously have been generated from two.
This means we need to use fewer animals to understand how different parts of the brain respond to the same stimulus. For the same reason we try to compare drug effects within the same animal as much as possible.
Ultimately, all of this work reduces the total number of animals needed to meet scientific aims and we continue to strive to reduce animal use in research even further.
Researchers in the Department of Psychology are studying how the brain helps us find our way around and remember where things are. These abilities can begin to decline very early in Alzheimer’s disease, leading to everyday problems such as getting lost or forgetting where objects have been left. The team is focusing on a part of the brain called the subiculum, which is involved in memory and is one of the areas affected early in Alzheimer’s disease.
The researchers discovered a new type of brain cell that helps keep track of where important objects are, including how far away they are and which direction they are in (Poulter et al., 2021, Nature Neuroscience). Lord Winston, Professor of Science & Society at Imperial College London, said: “This discovery gives a possible insight into certain kinds of dementia which are now of massive importance. The idea that loss or change of such cells might be an early biomarker of disease could lead to earlier diagnosis and more effective therapies for one of the most intractable medical conditions”.
Building on this discovery, the team has developed a human virtual-reality task that preliminary results suggest is more sensitive to cognitive ageing than standard NHS pen-and-paper tests. More recently, in 2026, the team published new findings in Nature Communications showing that activity across the subiculum forms a predictive map of future locations (Bennett et al., 2026).
A key aim of the wider research programme is to bridge the gap between animal and human research. The team also runs Neuraclin, bringing together researchers and clinicians working across different species and approaches, so that discoveries about how memory works in the brain can be translated more effectively into understanding and treating human disease.
The research has received further BBSRC funding for a new four-year project beginning in October 2026, supporting continued work on subicular brain circuits in memory, ageing and disease.
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By developing and utilising new behavioural tasks for rats, the ‘Memory in the Rat’ project is enabling experts in the department of Psychology to increase our understanding of how memory is stored and maintained in the brain. Researchers are using the tasks to assess types of memory that are critically impaired in disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease and in ageing, and to make careful and selective damage to particular systems in the brain to test hypotheses about how these systems store and represent different types of memory.
By understanding how and where in the brain specific types of memory are stored, we can better target drug therapies to these regions, increasing our chances of being able to improve memory in our old age and in disorders where memory becomes impaired (such as Alzheimer’s disease).
A 5 year project (2015-2020) was funded through an InnovateUK grant with Campden Instruments and the NC3Rs CRACK IT scheme, which has enabled researchers to develop a new apparatus for behavioural testing. This has significantly reduced the number of animals needed, as well as improving the reliability of the information gained from the tests, providing better understanding of the processes underlying memory.
(Image by NC3Rs)
Experts in the Department of Psychology are investigating the psychological processes and neural mechanisms underlying how time influences learning and memory.
This builds on their earlier research which identified that a specific protein in the brain is needed to help animals judge how important an event is based not only on how many time it occurs, but on how these occurrences are spaced in time (i.e. how frequently something good or bad happens). This finding is important for theories of how the brain forms associations. It shows that learning isn’t just about counting events—it’s about understanding their timing, and that this timing‑based learning depends on specific molecular machinery.
Under their new licence, the researchers will work with mice and rats to look further at how temporal information shapes behaviour, how different psychological processes contribute to learning, and how these processes map onto specific brain regions and neurotransmitter systems. This work will advance fundamental knowledge of how learning is achieved in the brain and support the development of psychologically plausible models of brain function. This in turn will help to clarify the causes and potential treatments of disorders involving abnormal learning and memory, as in neuropsychiatric diseases.
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