Strategic Design of Alternative Methods to Reduce Animal Testing

Inhalation toxicity in mammals is one animal test that is similar to aquatic toxicity tests with fish, since the chemical exposure is directly across the respiratory organ. QSAR modeling of aquatic toxicity has been successful because a systematic database was designed to reveal the chemical determinants of toxicity. However, the available data for inhalation toxicity in mammals are of poor quality collectively and have no systematic design. Consequently, attempts to develop QSAR models for inhalation toxicity or to compare these effects with those in fish have been largely unconvincing to the skeptic.

Rather than conduct additional rodent tests, the International QSAR Foundation has developed a project to compile high-quality inhalation data from the last 50 years, and then to integrate rodent data with the systematic data in the fish database. This result is being accomplished through meticulous tracking of each rodent test back to the primary reference, and discarding all ambiguous data yielded by unreliable test methods. This project has already produced a tremendous improvement in QSAR models without the need for a single new toxicity test.

Critical reviews of the literature are labor intensive and are not glamorous research  .  .  .  with the result that critical reviews like this are generally not supported by government funding. Your support is needed to keep this effort going and to make high-quality data available to QSAR specialists around the world. The wider the distribution of high-quality data and models, the greater the influence we will have on preventing redundant and otherwise unnecessary tests.