It has been approximately 30 years since the OECD held the conference on validation of alternatives to experimental animals for its safety evaluation and the administrative acceptance was held in 1996. During this period, OECD has admitted various alternative methods.
There are many future issues. One of them is said to develop alternatives to reproductive and developmental toxicity study. However, this development has been far more troublesome than we expected. In fact, its future direction is still unclear.
As an alternative to the developmental toxicity test, more than 30 ways of testing methods using both the vertebrate and invertebrate have been devised. From about 20 years ago, within the various methods, especially three methods, MM, EST, and WEC have been drawn attention and various data comparing each characteristics exist. As a result of comparing these data, WEC matches most of those three methods with in vivo test data, and recently in EU, WEC has come to attract attention as an alternative to the developmental toxicity test. The fact that WEC is the only method of them that we can confirm the morphological abnormality explains well about (makes us understand) its match with in vivo testing data.
Today, I would like to introduce the characteristics of each testing method as alternatives to the developing toxicity test, and the advantage and disadvantage of WEC especially.
On top of it, I will also introduce the zebrafish and refer to the present situation and the future possibility of the alternatives to reproductive and developmental toxicity study.