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

[Allen Smith]

In message
<8CF6A92CB628444FB3C757618CD2803906EBD087 at exbe1.cmpcntr.tc.trincoll.edu> (on
14 February 2008 15:20:32 -0500), James.Hughes at trincoll.edu (Hughes, James
J.) wrote:
>
>One of the predictions I made in Citizen Cyborg that has been poo-poo-ed
>by some. Happened a lot faster than I expected:

I can predict what will happen if our current culture of "government must
exclude all ('unnatural') risk" continues - something will go wrong that
could have been caught by animal testing, and there will be a
backlash. Hopefully it'll be against the failure to do animal testing at the
final stages (high-throughput without animals at all is fine for the initial
stages, don't get me wrong; note that people are working on doing
high-throughput _with_ animals, BTW, such as with fruit flies and
C. elegans (nematodes) - it's a major areas of interest in aging research,
for instance) as opposed to against whatever field this happens
to. It'll probably be something involving one of developmental bio, the
brain, or the immune system.

	-Allen

>
>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.
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-- 
Allen Smith                       http://cesario.rutgers.edu/easmith/
February 1, 2003                               Space Shuttle Columbia
Ad Astra Per Aspera                     To The Stars Through Asperity