Rabbit Rest: Can Lab-grown Human Skin Replace Animals in Toxicity Testing?

September 2, 2010, 1:10 am by Scientific American: Health

It likely comes as no surprise that many common household chemicals and medical products as well as industrial and agricultural chemicals, may irritate human skin temporarily or, worse, cause permanent, corrosive burns. In order to prevent undue harm regulators in the U.S. and beyond require safety testing of many substances to identify their potential hazards and to ensure that the appropriate warning label appears on a product. Traditionally, such skin tests have been done on live animals--although in recent decades efforts to develop humane approaches , along with ones that are more relevant to people have resulted in new models based on laboratory-grown human skin.The most recent chapter of this ongoing effort was written on July 22 when the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)--an international group that, among other things, provides guidelines to its 32-member countries on methods to assess chemical safety--officially approved three commercially available in vitro models of human skin for use in chemical testing. Specifically, the new guideline ( OECD Test No. 439 ) stipulates that the models can serve as an alternative to animals in tests for skin irritation, one of several human health endpoints for which chemicals are tested. Similar 3-D models were approved for corrosion tests in 2004, leaving many hopeful that soon it may be possible to the assess the full spectrum of a chemical's effects on human skin--from irritation to corrosion--without using live animals. [More] United States - Health - Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development - Medicine - Irritation

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