p>In light of the two new regulations affecting animal testing - one of which will require additional tests on chemicals, the other of which requires cosmetics manufacturers to reduce and eventually stop testing ingredients on animals - a briefing was held in Brussels on 23 June.
"The process of making available alternatives has reached a new dimension," said Thomas Hartung from the European Centre for the Validation of Alternative Methods ( ECVAM), which is part of the Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC). "It is my view that the time for this idea has come, and the Commission is supporting it on a new scale," he added.
According to the CORDIS report these comments can be verified with hard facts in terms of EU spending. The Commission has already awarded €20 million to research in this area under the Sixth Framework Programme (FP6) in response to proposals received following the first call alone. More projects are expected to receive funding following the closure of the second call, which is now open.
ECVAM has also seen an increase in its budget - from €25 million under FP5, to 35 €million under FP6. The centre is, however, struggling to keep up with demand. In the 11 years since ECVAM was founded, 16 methods have been validated, and two more are currently undergoing peer review, which Dr Hartung sees as a huge success. But, he added, 'at the moment we have more methods that we could validate than we are able to. For the first time in history we have become the bottleneck.'
All speakers agreed that the next step must be to speed up the validation process. This normally takes around three years, although the new pyrogen test took seven years to validate in all OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries.
The validation process should be accelerated "for the security of consumers first of all, then for the wellbeing of animals and the protection of the environment, but also in order to ensure the future of research and to maintain the leadership position that the European Union occupies in this area," said Busquin.
Several scientists made the point that alternative testing methods not only avert animal suffering, but are cheaper and more efficient. "In-vitro tests have all the potential to be robotised. This could never happen with animal testing,"said Dr Hartung.