Cellular peptide cake is the best

We can probably never get rid of animal testing entirely for clinical research, we’ll always need to validate simulations in animals before moving on to humans.

Getting rid of animal testing is the exact purpose of organ-on-a-chip research! This is actual bioengineered cultures, not simulations (not dissing on computational biochemistry - also extremely important)

If you can test without the full animal, then models (in this context, models = what you use for testing, be it cultures or animals) based on human induced pluropotent stem cells (ie cells taken from live, adult humans and forced to revert to a stem cell status) in an in vitro setting can actually be more relevant to human physiology than live animal models.

There are a lot of caveats (if it were easy, it would already be done), and there are barriers needed to be overcome for in vitro models to even come close to in vivo and ex vivo models. But a lot of people are investing in it, not (only) due to ethics but also due to lower model cost and better match of in vitro results with the actual effect on a live human body.

I can give papers when I get home, if you want.

Edit: I went on a deep dive on medical applications: suffice it to say, this is useless for behavioral experiments

Best solution would be to not use antiquated systems for testing for human consumption, a method that isn't even that indicative of how it would react to a human anyway.

I'd like to see their survey results

Not really. It causes them stress. “Safe” and “Humane” are variable. But it definitely isn’t the “best” restraint method.

lifting and holding by the tail, and handling using a soft plastic restraint cone, resulted in significant increases in mean arterial pressure and heart rate compared with baseline.3 The authors concluded that being lifted in a restraint cone appeared to be the most disturbing handling method for the rats, followed by the tail method, as determined by prolonged duration of increased cardiovascular parameters as compared with the encircling or scruffing methods.3

As for example explored by this paper: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10844733/

The rat is safe in that it can't hurt itself or others, but they feel the same about this kind of confinement as humans do. I guess whether that counts as humane is a matter of opinion.