Is there any other way than using animals to test new products?

Question: Is there any other way than using animals to test new products?
- Keywords:
  animal testing,
  testing products
Asked by jorrito98 to Jack, Jon, Tom, Yalda on 18 Mar 2013.
- Jon Marles-Wright answered on 18 Mar 2013:
  
  The EU has just banned the sale of any cosmetic product that is tested on animals, so this a good question at the moment. I can see no reason at all why cosmetics should be tested on animals, there are ways to make sure they are safe without doing this.
  
  Testing new drugs is very expensive and has to be very thorough to make sure they are safe and effective, so we do still need to do some live-animal testing. We can use single cells grown in the laboratory to study their effects, but the cells we use sometimes don’t react to drugs how a live animal would. So we still use animals to test how drugs work in the body. Even using these animal models, we still don’t know exactly how drugs are going to work in humans, so we have to do tests in human subjects to see if they work for us and to test for side-effects.
  
  Lots of scientists are working with human cells and stem-cells to make methods to test drugs without using animals, but we are still a little way off these being as useful for the safe development of drugs.
- Tom Branson answered on 18 Mar 2013:
  
  Jon has pretty much got it all there. Animal tests are done on some drugs as a first test, but these are often not very good comparrisons to humans and so we still have to do human trials
  
  Rats are often used to see where drugs and proteins travel to in the body, if they get into the brain or if the drugs build up in the spinal cord. These animals will then be killed. But we have to consider if it is better to do these tests in rats, or in humans? or do no tests at all and have no information about how the drugs might act?
- Jack Heal answered on 19 Mar 2013:
  
  Animal testing is an important stage when it comes to making sure a drug is safe. Alternatives like computer simulations or cell cultures just aren’t sophisticated enough. Computers aren’t advanced enough to model every interaction which could be affected by a new drug, and cell cultures don’t have nervous sytems, or large networks of organs. Once a drug has been passed as being safe to use on animals then it can be tested on humans. At this stage it is pretty certain that the humans won’t die as a result. There are still problems in moving from rats to humans though – there’s quite a size difference for example!
  The testing process is really long, and yes it does involve animals but providing the use of animals is well-regulated, it’s a necessary step.
  As Jon said, this is just for medical drugs – cosmetic drugs are a different thing altogether!
- Yalda Javadi answered on 19 Mar 2013:
  
  The boys have got it covered here!

Question: Is there any other way than using animals to test new products?

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