Thursday, 11 June 2020 12:11

Read-across is most commonly used: The use of alternatives to animal testing in chemical safety Featured

In its current report 2020, the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) informs, that there have been some changes in the use of alternatives to animal testing compared to the last study in 2017.


Instead of using animal testing for chemical risk assessment, manufacturers and marketers prefer to use existing information about similar substances (read-across), make use of data waiving or combine information from different sources (weight of evidence approach). The prediction of properties of structurally similar substances using computer models (QSAR) is also in high demand.

Referring to in vitro methods, there has been a strong increase in the use of alternatives in the area of skin corrosion/irritation, severe eye damage/eye irritation, and, above all, for an investigation of possible skin sensitization. The methods mentioned here have been approved for a longer time. Under the title How to avoid unnecessary testing on animals, ECHA recommends the use of alternative methods instead of animal testing and has issued a guideline on this.

However, animal tests in the area of acute toxicity (all routes) and short-term toxicity tests on fish were still common during the observed time period.

There is still no accepted replacement for the endpoints developmental and reproductive toxicity. In order to at least reduce the number of animals, these investigations are increasingly carried out in a combined repeated dose toxicity study with the reproductive/developmental toxicity screening test, ECHA said in its report.

Genotoxicity studies in vivo have decreased slightly compared to in vitro studies without animals.

Source and further information:
https://echa.europa.eu/