Animal testing alternatives come alive in USElie Dolgin
from Nature Medicine 16, 1348 (2010)
In Europe, long-standing public opposition toward animal testing has led to a broad push to develop alternative means for assessing the potential hazards of drugs. But similar efforts across the Atlantic have often lagged far behind. Now, with the formation of a new society dedicated to finding nonanimal testing methods, as well as new government programs, many experts perceive a sea change in US policy.
“There just seems to be an uprising and enthusiasm in the US for finding these alternative methods,” says Erin Hill, vice president of program development at the Institute for In Vitro Sciences, a nonprofit testing center in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Hill, together with Kristie Sullivan from the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, unveiled the new 'American Society for Cellular and Computational Toxicology' at the In Vitro Alternatives Forum in Alexandria, Virginia this past October. Although only a handful of non–board members have signed up to the society thus far, “we're getting a couple more each day as word gets out,” says Sullivan.
“It's an important step,” remarks Thomas Hartung, director of the Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and a member of the new society's board of directors. He points to a “long-lasting tradition in Europe of alternative methods” for testing compounds, adding that “in the US there was no equivalent” until now.
The formation of the new society comes three years after the US National Research Council (NRC) issued a report calling for a complete overhaul in the way chemicals, pharmaceuticals and pollutants are assessed for toxicity. To help implement the report, the Humane Society of the United States, the Hamner Institutes for Health Sciences and a number of key industrial stakeholders, including Dow Chemical, Johnson & Johnson and Procter & Gamble, teamed up last year to form the Human Toxicology Project Consortium. The consortium held its first public symposium last month in Washington, DC. Full article at Nature Medicine
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