In silico methods - Computational alternatives to animal testing.

ALTEX 35(1), 2018 126 and Refinement of animal testing), their beginnings, impact and development over the years as well as the introduction of additional Rs such as Responsibility, Rehabilitation or Remember. Topics and strategies such as the use of “lower” animals, fewer animals, maximizing study outcome, animal sharing and welfare were discussed. Prof. Schneider closed his talk leading over to in silico methods including frameworks for high quality science, planning experiments and power analysis over databases, visualization tools and data analysis procedures, prediction models, and quantitative structure-activity relationships. Susanna Röblitz (ZIB, FU, Berlin) presented the area of computational systems biology starting with the definition of a model, which differs between experimental, conceptual and mathematical models. Mathematical models are built to formalize human interpretation. In accordance with the quote “A model should be as simple as possible but not any simpler” (Albert Einstein), it is important to achieve the right balance between simplicity and accuracy. Ordinary differential equations are used in systems biology, e.g., to describe kinetics. Since biological processes are non-linear, the models often exhibit non-obvious behavior. It is still a major challenge to estimate model parameters and to quantify the uncertainty of model predictions. Using an example (female menstrual cycle based on clinical data), she showed the A seminar and interactive workshop on “In silico Methods – Computational Alternatives to Animal Testing” was held in Berlin, Germany, organized by Annemarie Lang, Frank Buttgereit and Andrea Volkamer at the Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin, on August 17-18, 2017. During the half-day seminar, the variety and applications of in silico methods as alternatives to animal testing were presented with room for scientific discussions with experts from academia, industry and the German federal ministry (Fig. 1). Talks on computational systems biology were followed by detailed information on predictive toxicology in order to display the diversity of in silico methods and the potential to embrace them in current approaches (Hartung and Hoffmann, 2009; Luechtefeld and Hartung, 2017). The following interactive one-day Design Thinking Workshop was aimed at experts, interested researchers and PhD-students interested in the use of in silico as alternative methods to promote the 3Rs (Fig. 2). Forty participants took part in the seminar while the workshop was restricted to sixteen participants.