Date published: 2008/02/15
The BBC says:
US scientists are taking the first step towards testing potentially hazardous chemicals on cells grown in a laboratory, without using live animals.
Two government agencies are looking into the merits of using high-speed automated robots to carry out tests.
The long-term goal is to reduce the cost, time and number of animals used in screening everything from pesticides to household chemicals.
The move follows calls for scientists to rely less on animal studies.
...
Speaking in a live link-up, Dr Francis Collins, Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institute of Health (NIH), said high throughput screening might provide a faster, cheaper method of testing environmental chemicals."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," he explained.
"Although that approach has given us valuable information, 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."
The research collaboration between the NIH and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has the potential to revolutionise the way that toxic chemicals are identified, he said.
"Ultimately, what you are looking for is, does this compound do damage to cells?" said Dr Collins.
"So could we, in fact, instead of looking at a whole animal as our first line of analysis, look at individual cells from different organisms of different animals with different concentrations of the compound?"
A reasonable enough idea, but although it is obvious that testing animals "doesn't always predict which chemicals will be harmful to humans", cells are almost certainly bound to be much worse predictors of anything. For now, this technology is pie in the sky.
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