Genetic toxicology and its role in the detection of carcinogens is currently undergoing a period of reappraisal. There is an increasing interest in developing alternatives to animal testing and the three R's of reduction, refinement and replacement are the basis for EU and national animal protection laws the Seventh Amendment to the EU Cosmetics Directive will ban the marketing of cosmetic/pers...

Non-invasive real time in vivo molecular imaging in small animal models has become the essential bridge between in vitro data and their translation into clinical applications. The tremendous development and technological progress, such as tumour modelling, monitoring of tumour growth and detection of metastasis, has facilitated translational drug development. This has added to our knowledge on ...

Bioassays that involve the use of laboratory animals are often considered to be the ‘gold standard’ for the detection and titration of certain pathogens. This holds particularly true for prions,1,2 which are the proteinaceous infectious particles that cause fatal neurodegenerative diseases in animals (e.g. scrapie, bovine spongiform encephalopathy [BSE]) and humans (e.g. sporadic or variant Cre...

In contrast to animal testing required by law to guarantee minimum safety standards for the licensing of drugs and chemicals, there are no regulations in basic research forcing scientists to perform animal tests. By (usually) free choice, questions are posed and hypotheses are examined which, in many cases, can only be answered by means of animal tests. Just as easily, different questions could...

A configuration of unit cubes in three dimensions with integer coordinates is called an animal if the boundary of their union is homeomorphic to a sphere. Shermer discovered several animals from which no single cube may be removed such that the resulting configurations are also animals [16]. Here we obtain a dual result: we give an example of an animal to which no cube may be added within its m...

Tissue engineering is a multidisciplinary field that combines aspects of biology, material sciences, engineering and medicine - the ultimate goal being able to fabricate replacement tissues and/or organs for an ageing population. However, parallel to this milestone, is the exploitation of the biomimetic constructs as feasible alternatives to in vivo/ex vivo toxicity testing models due to their ...