J Pharm Pharmacogn Res 2(Suppl. 1): S15, 2014
Special supplement with the abstract book of LATINFARMA 2013
Oral Communication
CO 027: PROPOSED METHODS AND ESPECIALLY STEM CELLS AS POTENTIAL REPLACEMENT METHODS TO STUDY HUMAN PATHOLOGIES
Bercovier H.
Head of the National Committee for Animal Experimentation and Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.Abstract
Ex vivo experiments, Phase 0, computational modeling, fMRI on Human and Stem Cells studies have been presented as potential replacement methods for animal experimentation. Many paradoxes are not often envisaged such as the following statement as an example: “instead of using living animals, certain experiments can be carried out on tissue samples in vitro. However the ex vivo preparations cannot regenerate, so they must be acquired by killing animals. Legally, killing an animal to obtain tissue samples is not considered an animal experiment (therefore reducing artificially the number of animal experimentations!!!), even if the animal in question is a vertebrate. In contrast, it is regarded as an animal experiment to anesthetize a vertebrate, make observations while the animal is under anesthesia and then to kill the animal by increasing the dose of anesthetic”. The replacement of in vivo experiments with in vitro methods does not reduce significantly at first the number of research animals that are killed. On the contrary, the limited survival time of brain slices, for example, restricts the amount of data that can be obtained from a single experiment. We will further discuss additional replacement methods and evaluate them in the light of new molecular tools and common sense.