Three governmental agencies made a decision that will certainly go straight to the hearts of the animal rights activists: The Environmental Protection Agency, together with the National Toxicology Program and the National Institutes of Health – Chemical Genomics Center announced the development of a program that aims at stopping animal testing one and for all.

The Memorandum of Understanding is a noble gesture if we think of the animals that have been submitted to testing chemical products and drugs designed for humans, but unfortunately, it is going to take a while. Some optimistic estimations say the process will take approximately 10 years to complete, but would mean severely reducing the number of animals used for testing.

“The goals of this [memorandum] are to investigate the use of new tools to identify mechanisms of chemically induced biological activity, prioritize chemicals for more extensive toxicological evaluation, and develop more predictive models of in vivo biological response. Success in achieving these goals is expected to result in test methods for toxicity testing that are more scientifically and economic efficient,” the Memorandum of Understanding says.

The purpose of the collaboration between NCGC, NTP and EPA is to “find out if and how potential chemical toxicants affect various types of cells and individual genetic targets within them,” NCGC Director Christopher P. Austin said (genome.gov)

The sad thing is that animals have been extensively used for testing purposes and no real alternatives have been presented so far to that method. But the high screening technologies developed in recent years are now able to identify the genes and pathways in cells affected by toxic compounds, which means the tendency will be more towards robotized means of testing various toxic products rather than towards animal testing.

The new method will not be implemented all at once, it requires time, but scientists say it is much more effective, less time-consuming and possibly more efficient than using animals, as sometimes animal testing doesn’t assure scientists that the chemicals will be harmless to humans.