Over the years, the testing of sensitising chemicals has relied heavily on animal experimentation, leading to calls to replace these animal experiments with in vitro tests. However, to date, no validated non-animal replacements are available for identification of skin sensitising chemicals; instead, most of these tests tend to be carried out with mice or guinea pigs.
To the delight of campaigners working in this area, new research techniques are now helping to reduce this reliance on animal testing. In addition, not only will experiments like these help researchers to use fewer animals in the testing process, but they may also yield more useful results, be more cost-effective and correlate more closely to human reactivity.
Already, new insights in this area have led to several in vitro tests currently under review by the European Centre for the Validation of Alternative Methods (ECVAM).
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