Subsidies for assessing the safety of substances without animal testing
How do we ensure that scientists and assessors accept existing animal-free research models, so that they will actually be used? Via the scientific funding bodies of the Dutch Research Council (NWO) and the Netherlands Organisation for Health Research and Development (ZonMw), six ministries have made almost €3 million available for research that answers this question
Substance safety
Every day, people are exposed to chemical substances in medicines, cosmetics and the environment. That is why it is necessary to assess the safety of these substances. This often takes place through animal testing. At the same time, more and more tests could be done without the use of animals, if they were to be approved. Yet building trust in the use of these animal-free methods is unfortunately a complex process and takes a long time.
Three partners get to work
Wageningen University & Research is mapping out how test-tube and petri-dish research is valued by society, regulators and scientists. Do they have faith in these methods, or do they think that testing on animals is safer?
Radboud University is exploring whether it can be proven that a substance is toxic or not without the use of animals, and whether authorities and society as a whole would also accept and trust such proof.
Utrecht University is researching whether scientists, assessors and society have sufficient trust in animal-free research on substances that affect human hormone balance.
Read more about these studies on animal-free models in safety assessments (in Dutch).