Since the beginning of this year, the NTS have been recorded in a new form and recently in an EU-wide database called ALURES. The new requirements for the content of the NTS are based on negotiations with the EU member states and resulted in the implementing decision (EU) 2020/569. This means that a national publishing, such as in the German database www.animaltestinfo.de from the Federal Institute for Risk Assessment is no longer necessary. Meanwhile, there are nearly 2,500 entries in the database with 1393 data sets from Germany.

The transparency is in line with Article 43 of Directive 2010/63/EU, as amended by Regulation (EU) 2019/1010. In addition, reports on the statistics to be published annually and on the NTS will be published, aiming to structure these data to provide a better understanding of where and how animals are still used in science today.  According to the EU website, this type of reporting should help identify areas of animal use where science should urgently develop alternative approaches, focus research and development efforts and funding. However, more time is needed to develop alternative approaches, he said.

An NTS must have been published in the EU database within a period of six months after approval of the animal experiment.

ALURES is publicly available to anyone.

Sources:
https://ec.europa.eu/environment/chemicals/lab_animals/alures_nts_en.htm
https://ec.europa.eu/environment/chemicals/lab_animals/reports_en.htm
https://op.europa.eu/de/publication-detail/-/publication/1fa78fbf-85f8-11ea-bf12-01aa75ed71a1/language-de
https://op.europa.eu/de/publication-detail/-/publication/dfbe9cec-bcf2-11ea-811c-01aa75ed71a1/language-de/format-PDF/source-search