Reducing animal use through more accurate in vitro mutagenicity testing

不同化工部门的持续创新预计将提供新的、更好的和更有效的药品、除草剂、杀虫剂和消费品。公众期望这些措施既安全又有效。癌症风险可能是最令人担忧的。最强的致癌物是诱变剂：改变我们细胞中DNA序列的化合物。自20世纪70年代以来，使用在实验室培养的细菌或人/动物细胞来识别诱变剂的测试一直在使用，它们在确保化学安全方面一直很有效。然而，这些检测通常会对非诱变物产生阳性结果--“假阳性”。这意味着，由于错位的安全考虑，许多潜在的有用甚至拯救生命的化学品将会丢失。为了识别假阳性，在接触人类之前使用的动物数量增加了--经常发现这些化合物确实是致癌物质。显而易见的解决方案是开发更准确的基于细胞的测试，这将减少对动物的这种使用，并为人们带来更多有用和安全的产品：这就是这个项目的雄心。

Continued innovation by the diverse chemical sectors is expected to provide new, better, and more effective medicines, herbicides, pesticides and consumer products. The public expects these to be safe as well as effective. Cancer risk is perhaps the most concerning. The most potent carcinogens are mutagens: compounds that alter the DNA sequences in our cells. Tests that identify mutagens using bacteria or human/animal cells grown in laboratories have been in use since the 1970s, and they have been effective in ensuring chemical safety. However, these tests often produce positive results for non-mutagens - 'false positive'. This mean that many potentially useful or even life-saving chemicals will have been lost due to misplaced safety concerns. To identify false positives, the number of animals used before exposing humans, is increased - often finding that the compounds are indeed carcinogens. The obvious solution is the development of more accurate cell-based tests, which will reduce this use of animals and bring more useful and safe products for people to use: and that is the ambition of this project.