Alternatives methods to animal testing: Counting of cells prior to culture© EC (2007)
International scientific agreement on validation of alternatives to animal testing
Global efforts to promote alternatives to testing on animals have received a significant boost today, 27 April, through the signing of a cooperation agreement by the JRC and a number of international bodies tasked with the validation of alternative test methods.
The European Centre for the Validation of Alternative Methods (ECVAM), which is hosted by the JRC Institute for Health and Consumer Protection (IHCP), together with its equivalents in the US (ICCVAM), Japan (JACVAM) and Canada's Environmental Health Science and Research Bureau, have entered into a cooperation agreement that should give new impetus to the availability worldwide of scientifically proven alternatives to animal test methods.
The agreement establishes enhanced international cooperation and coordination on the scientific validation and evaluation of in-vitro toxicity testing methods. Strengthened collaboration among the signatories will ensure that alternative methods are reproducible, based on sound science and able to accurately identify health hazards. This in turn should facilitate more readily considered and accepted test methods by regulatory bodies in the EU, US, Japan, Canada and internationally by the OECD, for example.
It is expected that as a result of the agreement, testing methods that undergo scientific validation will be more credible and more rapidly applied by the testing community.
27/04/09