Document Type
Editorial and Commentary
Publication Date
4-2013
Abstract
Modern toxicology has embraced in vitro methods, and major hopes are based on the Omics technologies and systems biology approaches they bring along (Hartung and McBride in ALTEX 28(2):83–93, 2011; Hartung et al. in ALTEX 29(2):119–28, 2012). A culture of stringent validation has been developed for such approaches (Leist et al. in ALTEX 27(4):309–317, 2010; ALTEX 29(4):373–88, 2012a; Toxicol Res 1:8–22, 2012b), while the quality and usefulness of animal experiments have been little scrutinized. A new study (Seok et al. 2013) now shows the low predictivity of animal responses in the field of inflammation. These findings corroborate earlier findings from comparisons in the fields of neurodegeneration, stroke and sepsis. The low predictivity of animal experiments in research areas allowing direct comparisons of mouse versus human data puts strong doubt on the usefulness of animal data as key technology to predict human safety.
Recommended Citation
Leist, M., & Hartung, T. (2013). Inflammatory findings on species extrapolations: humans are definitely no 70-kg mice. Archives of toxicology, 87(4), 563-567. DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/s00204-013-1038-0
Included in
Bioethics and Medical Ethics Commons, Design of Experiments and Sample Surveys Commons, Laboratory and Basic Science Research Commons
Comments
© The Author(s) 2013
Open Access: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and the source are credited.