A New Way to Assist the Decrease of Animal Testing

Following the development of “mini brain” model, Scientist team from John Hopkins University build a chemical map database which can be used to predict the toxicity of tens thousands of chemicals and then save the needs for animal testing. The database is of great significance for the property identification of chemicals in the market without necessary data.

Thomas Hartung, who also leaded the “mini brain” research, directed this research. The team gained related data and studies regarding toxicity and safety from ECHA (European Chemicals Agency), and their own resource. In near future, even FDA, as well as many other authoritative organizations may be possible resources of the database. Then the team incorporated these materials into computer language to achieve the searching aim.

Once the project is available to the public, only by input related information of a chemical, the property information, or similar substances’ data and studies will be presented for the reference, eliminating the application of animal testing.

The recent two projects did in John Hopkins University are very significant in boosting the development of non-animal testing method for drug discovery to environmental friendly chemical tests. It’s worth to mention that the development of the two tasks was driven by the average number of the testing times on a single chemical. It’s researched that there were about 9000 animal tests conducted for about 3500 chemicals, and extremely, one chemical was tested for 45 times. The repeatable testing is a waste of resources and makes animal testing more inhumane.

The database project, along with the “mini brain” model is set to decrease even replace the use of animals like rat, and rabbits in the field, making scientific studies can be independent from putting other species into an unwanted state. The database as well as the “mini brain” model, will work to decrease even eliminate animal tests.