Possibilities for a New Approach to Chemicals Risk Assessment — The Report of a FRAME Workshop

Assuring consumer safety without animals: Applications for tissue engineering

Humans are exposed to a variety of chemicals in their everyday lives through interactions with the environment and through the use of consumer products. It is a basic requirement that these products are tested to assure they are safe under normal and reasonably foreseeable conditions of use. Within the European Union, the majority of tests used for generating toxicological data rely on animals. However recent changes in legislation (e.g., 7(th) amendment of the Cosmetics Directive and REACH) are driving researchers to develop and adopt non-animal alternative methods with which to assure human safety. Great strides have been made to this effect, but what other opportunities/technologies exist that could expedite this? Tissue engineering has increasing scope to contribute to replacing animals with scientifically robust alternatives in basic research and safety testing, but is this application of the technology being fully exploited? This review highlights how the consumer products industry is applying tissue engineering to ensure chemicals are safe for human use without using animals, and identifies areas for future development and application of the technology.

Alternative (non-animal) methods for cosmetics testing: current status and future prospects-2010

The 7th amendment to the EU Cosmetics Directive prohibits to put animal-tested cosmetics on the market in Europe after 2013. In that context, the European Commission invited stakeholder bodies (industry, non-governmental organisations, EU Member States, and the Commission's Scientific Committee on Consumer Safety) to identify scientific experts in five toxicological areas, i.e. toxicokinetics, repeated dose toxicity, carcinogenicity, skin sensitisation, and reproductive toxicity for which the Directive foresees that the 2013 deadline could be further extended in case alternative and validated methods would not be available in time. The selected experts were asked to analyse the status and prospects of alternative methods and to provide a scientifically sound estimate of the time necessary to achieve full replacement of animal testing. In summary, the experts confirmed that it will take at least another 7-9 years for the replacement of the current in vivo animal tests used for the safety assessment of cosmetic ingredients for skin sensitisation. However, the experts were also of the opinion that alternative methods may be able to give hazard information, i.e. to differentiate between sensitisers and non-sensitisers, ahead of 2017. This would, however, not provide the complete picture of what is a safe exposure because the relative potency of a sensitiser would not be known. For toxicokinetics, the timeframe was 5-7 years to develop the models still lacking to predict lung absorption and renal/biliary excretion, and even longer to integrate the methods to fully replace the animal toxicokinetic models. For the systemic toxicological endpoints of repeated dose toxicity, carcinogenicity and reproductive toxicity, the time horizon for full replacement could not be estimated.

Integrated Testing Strategies and the Prediction of Toxic Hazard

Over the past 20-30 years there has been a move towards reducing the use of animals in toxicity testing for industrial chemicals, pharmaceuticals, personal care and household products, for economic, scientific and animal welfare reasons. The need for alternatives has been emphasised by the EU REACH regulation, which requires the evaluation of tens of thousands of new and existing chemicals, and also within the pharmaceutical industry owing to the increasing rate at which drugs are being withdrawn from the market due to adverse effects not detected during preclinical testing. Significant effort is being placed into the development of non-animal test procedures using existing data, bioinformatics, in chemico, in silico and in vitro approaches and ethical human studies. Information from these diverse sources needs to be used intelligently and selectively leading to the development of what have become known as Integrated Testing Strategies (ITS). In this chapter factors that need to be considered in the development, evaluation, acceptance and use of ITS will be discussed.

Inhalation toxicity studies: OECD guidelines in relation to REACH and scientific developments

The OECD Health Effects Test Guidelines (TGs) provide guidance concerning the use of methods for the identification and characterization of hazards from chemical substances. These TGs are largely based on tests in routine use for many years and are known to yield information relevant to various types of toxicity. They have proven their value in practice and will remain of paramount importance for decades to come. However, the TGs describe mostly animal assays, and there is an increasingly strong urge to reduce animal testing on ethical grounds. In addition, assessment procedures are generally considered too slow and too rigid, which has resulted in elaborate testing of a relatively small number of chemicals, while virtually nothing is known about the vast majority of compounds. The major objectives of Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) are to improve the knowledge about the properties and use of chemicals and to speed up the procedure of risk assessment. The REACH text contains information requirements that can be met by OECD TGs but REACH also provides rules for adaptation of the standard testing regime. Also, various components of "Intelligent Testing Strategies" are described in order to limit animal testing. This paper briefly describes the OECD TGs for inhalation toxicity studies, including those in preparation, and their role in future hazard identification. This will be discussed in relation to the evaluation of the safety of thousands of chemicals in a relatively short period of time and scientific developments, including the use of alternatives to animal testing.