University of Cambridge to Lead £20 Million Hub for Testing Drugs on Patient Tissues

University of Cambridge to Lead £20 Million Hub for Testing Drugs on Patient Tissues

On August 12, the University of Cambridge announced that the UK Medical Research Council (MRC) had awarded £20 million to a new hub. The hub will create models of human tissues grown from cells donated by patients of the UK National Health Service and make them available to research groups. Its work will include AI methods.

Before a drug is tested in humans, developers must decide which candidates should advance to the next stage. This requires evidence of how a substance affects diseased tissue. A model grown from a patient’s cells retains some features of that patient’s biology, allowing researchers to observe the response in human cells.

One such tool is an organoid, a small, simplified tissue model grown from a patient’s cells. Researchers produce these models for the intestine, tumors, and brain. The new hub will provide them to universities and pharmaceutical companies for early testing of drug candidates.

Hub director Matthias Zilbauer explains the rationale:

“Because these miniature human tissues retain many of the unique biological features of an individual patient, they allow researchers to study disease and test potential treatments more accurately before clinical testing begins.”

The hub is intended to develop these models into technologies that can be reproduced and used across different laboratories. This would allow results obtained from patient tissues to inform the early selection of drug candidates beyond a single laboratory.

In November 2025, the UK government published its Replacing Animals in Science strategy and committed £75 million to it. The new hub adds shared human tissue models for drug development to this program.