Cell-based tests may reduce the need for animal testing

[Plazma Inferno!]

Scientists in the United States said Tuesday they were developing a faster, more efficient way of gauging the toxicity of chemicals, which may reduce the need for animal testing.
Using human cells in Petri dishes in the lab, they tested about 10,000 different types of chemical compounds including pesticides, industrial chemicals, food additives and drugs.
The results were used to build models to "predict" whether the compounds, or combinations of them, may be harmful to humans or the environment when used in new drugs or environmental chemicals.
Toxicity is one of the main reasons that new drugs fail, and it is hoped this library of toxicity data may spot unsafe chemical compounds at a far earlier phase of research.

http://phys.org/news/2016-01-cell-based-respite-lab-animals.html

 

[Edont Knoff]

Very promising. It's good to see that we'll soon have less need to torture animals for cuch tests.

It seems though, that some final tests must still be made with real animals (and humans) because substances go through several steps of "degradion", when the body tries to get rid of them, and not only the original substance must be tested eventually, but the whole process of degradion and all intermediate propducs till the body can excrete the substance.

E.g. alkohol itself isn't the real problem if you drink. The first step of degradation is acetaldehyde, a substance that is used to remove nail polish. It's quite a bit nastier than alcohol:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acetaldehyde

The second step of degradion is acetic acid. Better than the acetaldehyde, but still a somewhat agressive substance:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acetic_acid

Thus testing alcohol in cell cultures will primararily assess the toxicity of alcohol to these cells, but if one drinks alcohol, the body also has to deal with acetaldehyde and acetic acid - a cell culture usually shows different processes to degrade substances than the machinery of our bodies.

The problematic stage of alcohol degradion is the acetaldehyde - thats the product what makes you feel real bad. So a test with alcohol in a cell culture might miss the problematic step, unless these cells degrade the alcohol the same way as our body does.

Thus unfortunately these tests have limits. Still, they help to reduce the toll in animals, needed for testing, and this is an important step forward already.

 

[PhysBang]

I know a guy who is currently working on analyzing the specifics of how to use these tests as evidence and how to convince people of specifically how good these tests are as evidence. It is pretty cool.

 

[Edont Knoff]

I need to correct myself - it's acetone that is used to remove nail polish, not acetaldehyde. A related substance, but not the same. Sorry for that :/