'More Reliable' Form of Digital Analysis May Help to Eliminate Animal Testing
Using animals to test chemicals on medicines, cosmetics, and the like will no longer be needed in the future due to a more reliable approach that was discovered by scientists from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
The researchers claimed that they came up with a large database of common chemicals which they used to map the toxic properties of various chemical components. Then, they proved that they can predict the toxic properties contained by a new chemical compound that has structures which are the same as a known chemical.
According to the researchers, the new process is more accurate than finding out the toxicity using an animal testing.
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The study, published by the journal Toxicological Sciences on Wednesday, July 11, also claimed that the most advanced tool that predicts toxicity that was developed by the team has an average of around 87 percent accuracy in reproducing consensus animal-test-based results done in nine of the most common tests. This interpreted 57 percent of the animal toxicology testing in the world.
On the contrary, only 81 percent accuracy could be achieved when done using the typical animal testing.
"These results are a real eye-opener," principal investigator Thomas Hartung, a professor of environmental health and engineering at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University stated. "They suggest that we can replace many animal tests with computer-based prediction and get more reliable results," he added.
Hartung also shared that the new computerized approach could be used to more chemicals than animal testing. This means that a larger number from the approximately 100,000 chemicals contained by consumer products will be tested comprehensively since just a small number of them had been examined due to ethical and cost problems.
"Our automated approach clearly outperformed the animal test, in a very solid assessment using data on thousands of different chemicals and tests," Hartung also said. "So it's big news for toxicology."
