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Manchester researchers receive funding for non-animal drug testing

18/10/2006

Scientists at the University of Manchester have been awarded thousands of pounds to find ways of reducing the need for live animals in drug safety assessments.

A £130,000 grant from National Centre for the Replacement, Refinement and Reduction of Animals in Research will enable researchers to develop drug-testing techniques that do not require animals.

Dr Richard Walmsley and colleagues at Gentronix, a university spin-out company, are developing ways of using cultured human cells to filter out carcinogenic compounds in new drugs.

"The testing process developed at Gentronix has proven very reliable at telling us whether a drug will cause cancer but some chemicals, called promutagens, only become carcinogenic once they have passed through the body's liver," Dr Walmsley said.

"This grant will help us develop new non-animal experiments to identify these other toxic compounds and so reduce the need for animal testing."

However, Dr Walmsley does not believe that animal testing will disappear from drug testing in the near future "as you can't ask human volunteers to take novel drugs straight from testing done in tube tests".

Animal rights group Speak has said that non-animal methods of predicting the safety of drugs involves using vitro tests using human cells and tissues, as well as computer simulations.



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