Research and regulations face-up to a new era of non-animal testing alternatives
Hopes raised that approval for skin sensitisation test could mark the start of a raft of in vitro toxicity tests
Hopes for a new wave of toxicity tests that avoid the use of animals were raised at the end of June. For the first time the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) approved a non-animal method for checking skin sensitisation.
‘I am convinced that the testing strategy on skin sensitisation is a vanguard of new approaches to gain toxicological information without animal testing in the future,’ says Robert Landsiedel from BASF, who developed the test in collaboration with Givaudan.
Almost 40,000 animals were used in skin sensitisation tests in the EU and Norway in 2018 out of a total of 10.5 million animals used in research. Now, many of these could be replaced by the new test. This was only possible due to a deep understanding of the biological processes at work and then replicating those through a series of in vitro assays.