17 February 2008
Robots not rats
The US government is considering using high throughput methods to screen chemicals, a step which could replace animal tests. The new methods would use automated robots to test thousands of chemicals quickly and cheaply, without the use of living animals.
The Dr Hadwen Trust reported back in June 2007 that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the US had commissioned a report to evaluate the strategies used in chemicals testing. The report showed that non-animal methods can be used to replace animals in a wide range of toxicity tests, based largely on cells, often of human origin.
This new step is a collaboration between the EPA and the National Institute of Health and builds upon the recommendations of the previous report, taking it one step closer to becoming reality. The Dr Hadwen Trust welcomes this progress as a move towards safer toxicity testing for humans and a reduction in the suffering of animals.
The new methods could also mean improved safety for humans because the complication of inevitable species differences is removed if human cells are used. Greater numbers of chemicals can be tested than with traditional animal based tests as the methods are faster and cheaper. Automated robots could screen over 10,000 compounds a day compared with 10 to 100 studies a year on rodents.