In the news
19 Jul 2008
17 February 2008
US scientists shifting to robots instead of rats in chemical testing
Regulators in the USA are considering using high throughput methods to screen chemicals, a step which could replace invasive animal tests on animals such as mice and rats. The new methods would use automated robots to test thousands of chemicals quickly and cheaply, without the use of living animals force-fed or injected with toxic chemicals.
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, Toxicity Testing in the Twenty-first century: a vision and a strategy, showed that non-animal methods can be used to replace animals in a wide range of toxicity tests. It recommended the use of advanced non-animal methods using in vitro human cell lines, combined with computational methods and epidemiological studies to assess human exposure, because these are more human-relevant strategies for assessing the safety of large numbers of chemicals.
“We are pleased to see that the scientific credibility of traditional animal toxicity tests are rightly being questioned by these government agencies in what could and should be a major gear shift in toxicity testing worldwide.” says the Dr Hadwen Trust’s Wendy Higgins, “As well as causing immense suffering, these animal tests are of dubious scientific value as results between species can differ dramatically and the often immense chemical doses involved are irrelevant to real-life human exposure. This US research programme builds on the type of large-scale, forward-thinking proposals we need to see far more of if the potential of modern non-animal technologies is to be realised and real progress is to be made in saving millions of animals from the suffering of laboratory experiments.”
This latest development comes at a key moment in the history of toxicity testing. REACH, the largest mass animal testing programme in Europe’s history, will see the testing of 30,000 chemicals on up to 10 millions animals. Non-animal test strategies, like that being looked at in the US, could provide more reliable data, generated more quickly and at a dramatically lower cost than animal tests.
Scientists from the National Institute of Health (NIH) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) plan to develop sophisticated ‘robotic machines’ to screen the chemicals, based on similar technology already utilised to great effect in drug testing for medical research. The new methods could mean improved safety for humans because the inevitable complication of 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.
In Britain some 420,000 animal experiments were conducted in 2006 to test the safety of chemicals. Although precise statistics are not recorded in the USA, animal numbers for chemical testing are likely to be far higher. Worldwide, millions of animals are used in toxicity tests for industrial, household, cosmetic and agro-chemicals; these are mainly dogs, rabbits and rodents but monkeys are also used. They have chemicals force-fed (oral gavage), injected into their bloodstream, inhaled or administered via a nasal tube and the symptoms can be severe such as internal organ damage, bleeding from the eyes and nose, vomiting, tremors, seizures and even death.
Reported on BBC News Interactive, Dr Francis Collins, Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National NIH, said “Historically such toxicity has always been determined by injecting chemicals into laboratory animals, watching to see if the animals get sick, and then looking at their tissues under the microscope.” Although Dr Collins suggested that animal testing could provide what he considered to be ‘valuable information’, he admitted that “it is clearly quite expensive, it is time-consuming, it uses animals in large numbers and it doesn’t always predict which chemicals will be harmful to humans.”
ENDS
