According to what I understand it would not be Right Livelihood for a Buddhist to do this. There is a lot of medical research that doesn't have to take lives in order to find out how to save more lives. We have to consider the ethics involved in any medical research. Otherwise people could do anything with the justification that it may save more lives in the future.
We have to ask ourselves whether it is necessary for this type of research and can we actually do research that doesn't take lives instead.