British researchers claim drug testing breakthrough

British researchers have developed techniques in drug testing which could reduce the need to use animals, a report on the website of AlphaGalileo said on Thursday.

Previous checks to establish if a new drug is carcinogenic were often inconclusive and required further testing on live animals.

Now researchers at the University of Manchester have developed techniques using cultured human cells to more effectively weed out cancer-causing compounds.

"The current pre-animal tests that are used are highly sensitive and so most carcinogens are identified. The testing process has proven very reliable at telling whether a drug will cause cancer," said Richard Walmsley, whose company Gentronix, at the university, developed the techniques.

However Walmsley, who is based at the Faculty of Life Sciences, said such tests had poor specificity, adding that a lot of safe compounds were wrongly identified as potential carcinogens.

Some chemicals, called promutagens, only become carcinogenic once they have passed through the body's liver. This means that animal testing is still needed.

He said the researchers had been awarded 130,000 pounds by the National Center for the Replacement, Refinement and Reduction of Animals in Research which would help them establish new genotoxicity tests using cultured human liver cells to identify other toxic compounds, reducing the need for animal testing.

The researchers hoped the new test would not only reduce the number of compounds that were tested on live animals, but would also ensure harmless chemicals that could prove to be useful new drugs were not falsely labeled as carcinogens.

Source: Xinhua