Lack of data access hampers animal testing alternatives

Alternatives to animal testing are increasing, but industry needs to get better at sharing related data, the European Chemicals Agency has said.

Alternatives to animal testing were used in at least 89 per cent of projects undertaken by researchers registered at the agency, a report by ECHA found. To increase the figure industry needs to provide better quality data on compounds and methods, which would make such alternatives even better, the agency said.

The analysis, based on science projects submitted to ECHA between 2008 and 2016, showed that the most widely-used alternative is relying on data from similar substances known as read-across, which was used in 63 per cent of cases. The other options were combining information from different sources, used 43 per cent of the time, and computer modeling, used in 34 per cent of cases.