Born to die for the greater good?

Date: 24/02/05

Eleven million animals are used in laboratory tests in the European Union every year. While this figure is a two-thirds reduction on 20 years ago, large swathes of public opinion would regard it as 11 million too many.

Thomas Hartung, head of the European Centre for Validation of Alternative Methods (ECVAM), in Ispra, Italy, believes technological advances should bring down animal testing significantly in the foreseeable future.

The year 2004, he says, was a "breakthrough" for promoting alternatives. The 30-country Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development approved in vitro tests to replace experiments with animals to ascertain if chemicals burn the skin or are affected by light. This was the first time that the body which groups together industrialised countries had given its blessing to "full replacements", he says.

The ECVAM, part of the European Commission's Joint Research Centre, is now turning its attention to one of the most controversial tests conducted on animals: 'Lethal Dose 50%' (LD50).

The test, created in 1927, assesses the toxicity of a substance by giving it to animals until at least half of the chosen sample die. Anti-cruelty groups have complained it often causes agonising deaths, especially if a substance is not highly toxic and is administered in large amounts over a long period.

In the 1970s, Hartung notes, each chemical substance was tested on 150 animals. Scientific developments have seen the number slashed to 15 and, under plans being assessed at ECVAM, should be cut down to five.

ECVAM is also assessing 11 testing models as alternatives to the similarly controversial draize tests, where substances are applied to the eyes of animals. Such tests have been widely used in the past in cosmetic testing. Under a 2003 EU law, however, a complete ban is to be slapped on animal testing for the ingredients of cosmetics within six years of the law's implementation. France has mounted a challenge against the ban in the European Court of Justice.

The Commission acknowledges that its new chemicals strategy, REACH (registration, evaluation and authorisation of chemicals) would lead to a rise in the number of animals being subjected to tests, but argues that in the long term the process will make chemicals safer for generations to come.

Hartung agrees that the EU should plough resources into ensuring that animals do not bear the brunt of REACH but points out that the Union is already investing ten times more than the US in devising alternatives. Such EU funding came to €67 million in 1998-2002 and should be similar in 2002-06, he says.

Among the tangible results of ECVAM's research is that drugs intended to be injected into the patient can be assessed using human cell tissue. Previously, such experiments were conducted on 200,000 rabbits per year.

But Hartung does not believe it will be feasible to abandon animal testing in the short-term. "Nobody wants a new drug being tested on humans, without first being tested on animals," he claims. "I certainly don't."

The pace of developing alternatives will hinge on how rapidly computer modelling develops. "This is something very difficult," he says. "We still can't do a good weather forecast sometimes. Whether we can do a good forecast of how organisms will behave still has to be proven."

Emily McIvor from the European Coalition to End Animal Experiments counters: "It is important to remember that scientific opinion on this is revised all the time. A decade ago people were saying it would never be possible to test finished products in cosmetics without using animals. But now they are tested without using animals." She argues that many of the animal tests in use today have never been validated using modern methods.

When drafting the REACH proposal, she says, the European Commission did not pay adequate heed to whether tests in place now are reliable. Among the problems in applying animal tests to humans are that laboratory 'guinea pigs' tend only to be administered substances for a fixed amount of time, whereas people can be exposed to them over much of their lives and that animals used in experiments are generally much smaller than humans. "REACH is based on shaky science," she adds. "We need not only an overhaul of chemical policy; we also need an overhaul of tests."

Thomas Hartung, head of the European Centre for Validation of Alternative Methods (ECVAM), in Ispra, Italy, believes technological advances should bring down animal testing significantly in the foreseeable future.

• Prif ffynhonnell