[tt] US fed labs to replace animals with bio-chips and in silico methods to test safety

[Hughes, James J.]

One of the predictions I made in Citizen Cyborg that has been poo-poo-ed
by some. Happened a lot faster than I expected:

http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSN1446033720080214

Government labs try non-animal testing

Thu Feb 14, 2008 2:23pm EST

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Government labs will start moving to non-animal
methods such as cells and computer models to test chemicals, drugs and
toxins for safety, officials said on Thursday.

Such methods are faster, and are likely to be more accurate and far less
expensive, the National Institutes of Health and the Environmental
Protection Agency said.

The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the National
Human Genome Research Institute, both part of the NIH, said they would
work with the EPA to make sure the newer methods are more accurate
before expanding the program.

Animal testing has been the backbone of scientific research but NHGRI
director Dr. Francis Collins said it does not predict very well what a
chemical will do to a human being.

"It's slow. It's expensive," Collins told reporters in a telephone
briefing. "We are not rats and we are not even other primates," he
added.

"After all, ultimately what you are looking for is, does this compound
do damage to cells? Can we, instead of looking at a whole animal, look
at cells from different organs?"

The collaboration is starting out slowly and will cross-check the new
rapid tests, called high-throughput tests, against older tests of known
toxins.

"We need to exactly figure out what the correlations will be between
animal testing and this high-throughput approach," Collins said.

"You cannot abandon animal testing overnight," added NIH director Dr.
Elias Zerhouni.

NIEHS head Dr. Samuel Wilson said automated labs can now use non-animal
methods to test 100,000 compounds in up to 15 concentrations in two
days.

"One person would have to work eight hours a day, seven days a week for
six months to do that. It's much, much faster," Wilson said.

Writing in the journal Science, the NIH and EPA noted that between 10
and 100 tests can be run in a year using live rodents such as rats and
mice. Tests can be done more quickly using alternative animals such as
fish and fruitflies.

But more than 10,000 tests can be run every day using specialized cells
or lab chips.