3 Rs - Reduction: New Research To Cut Animal Testing, UK

New Research To Cut Animal Testing, UK

"The current pre-animal tests that are used are highly sensitive and so most carcinogens are identified," said Dr Walmsley, who is based in the Faculty of Life Sciences. "Unfortunately, such tests have poor specificity and a lot of safe compounds are also wrongly identified as potential carcinogens. This means that animal testing is still carried out, in case such compounds turn out to be safe.

"The testing process developed at Gentronix has proven very reliable at telling us whether a drug will cause cancer but some chemicals, called promutagens, only become carcinogenic once they have passed through the body's liver.

"This grant will help us develop new non-animal experiments to identify these other toxic compounds and so reduce the need for animal testing."

The funding - awarded by the National Centre for the Replacement, Refinement and Reduction of Animals in Research (NC3Rs) - will help the scientists establish new genotoxicity tests using cultured human liver cells. It is hoped the new test will not only reduce the number of compounds that are tested on animals but also ensure harmless chemicals that could prove to be useful new drugs are not falsely labelled as carcinogens.