The government yesterday announced plans for a new programme of research which could save more than 100,000 animals from use in scientific experiments.

In total, £2.4m will be spent on the projects. They include developing lab-based models of human cells to study diabetes and lung disease and techniques to improve the welfare of frogs used in experiments.

According to the Home Office, 3.1m procedures were carried out on animals in 2006, a 15-year high that makes Britain the most active country in Europe for animal experiments. Procedures involving mice, rats and other rodents accounted for 83% of experiments. Experiments on cats, dogs, horses and non-human primates were less than 1% of all procedures. The 11 new projects are part of a wider strategy to replace, reduce and refine - known as the 3Rs - the use of animals in research.

Launching the projects, science minister Ian Pearson said research using animals was a "small, but unfortunately still necessary" part of the process of scientific discovery. "Applying the 3Rs is central to carrying out this research as ethically and humanely as possible, something that opinion polls have consistently shown is important in maintaining public support for work involving animals."

He added: "Nobody else in the world is funding research to the level we are when it comes to alternatives to animals [but] I do have sympathy with the view that we ought to be doing more in this area."

The National Centre for the Replacement, Refinement and Reduction of Animals in Research (NC3Rs) was set up by the government in 2004 in response to a House of Lords select committee report on the use of animals in scientific procedures which encouraged more work to find ways of reducing animal use in experiments.

Chief executive Vicky Robinson said the current focus of the agency was twofold: tissue engineering research to build better models of animals and refining those experiments that fall under the Home Office's category of substantial severity. "This is the highest level of suffering legally allowed in the UK ... and involves research into such things as modelling Parkinson's disease, developing anti-microbial agents and vaccines, major surgical interventions, and toxicity studies where the death of the animal is required. In 2005 approximately 50 licences, 2% of the total number of licences, involved substantial severity. Trying to reduce the suffering of animals involved in this type of research is clearly important."

Earlier this year the government was accused of downplaying the suffering of some animals used in experiments. A high court judge ruled that, in categorising experiments at Cambridge University on marmosets in 2000 and 2001, the then home secretary had acted unlawfully when he licensed brain experiments as causing "moderate" rather than "substantial" suffering. The Home Office has said it is in the process of reviewing the procedures for categorising animal suffering in experiments.

Among the NC3Rs projects funded is £300,000 to a team led by Jamie Davies at the University of Edinburgh to reduce animal use in growing kidney tissue. Scientists can already grow mouse kidneys in the lab by extracting particular cells from embryos, but the procedure involves killing the pregnant mouse. Professor Davies intends to develop the technique so that the organs can be grown in culture, reducing the need for embryonic cells.

He added that, if successful, the technique could be extended to people. "If we can find cells that can build kidneys in mice, then we ought to, with ethically obtained human material, do the same thing - that's the distant vision."

Dr Robinson said the work would replace some of the 15,000 animals used in studies of kidney regeneration and transplantation each year.

She added that more work was planned to reduce animal use in experiments. "We'll also be shortly announcing a project which we have been working with the European pharmaceutical industry on to reduce the number of animals used in the acute toxicity tests which involve the death of the animals," she said.