Food for thought ... on the evolution of toxicology and the phasing out of animal testing.

There is something brewing in the field of toxicology: Last year's vision and strategy document published by the US National Academy of Sciences (NRC, 2007) has excited many toxicologists on both sides of the Atlantic. In February 2008 several American agencies announced a coalition to set this into practice (www. sciencemag.org/content/vol319/issue 5865/index.dtl): “We propose a shift from primarily in vivo animal studies to in vitro assays, in vivo assays with lower organisms, and computational modeling for toxicity assessments”. In USA Today of the same day we find a comment by Francis Collin, Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute: “[Toxicity testing] was expensive, time-consuming, used animals in large numbers and didn’t always work”. In the same article, Elias Zerhouni, Director of the NIH, is cited: “Animal testing won’t disappear overnight, but the agencies’ work signals the beginning of an end.” We have never heard anything like that from US federal agency representatives before. What is going on? What can we really expect and when?