Animal Testing

This article talks about how to minimised the animal testing by considering the three Rs, wich are:  replacement, refinement and reduction. The aim of this three Rs is to find alternatives to avoid animal suffer, by not using them alive in the experiments, or by using a smaller number of animals, and trying not to stress them and make them suffer during the experiment.

Here are some replacement for animal experiment:
1- LAL (limulus amoebocyte lysat) assay:  this test detects toxic compounds in drugs, proucts and devices. Replacing the use of live rabbits.
2- cells culture and stem cells (cells that can turn into any body cells): Animal and human cells can grow in a lab, this allows scientist to test for toxicity.
3- computer models: they predict the effects of chemicals on the body.

The AXLR8 iniciative, launched by the European commission, identifies areas of research that could lead to refinement, reduction and replacement of animals in research. One goal of this iniciative is to use fewer, and one day no animals in experiments.
A notice on the AXLR8 webside said: "Current reliance on high-dose animal toxicity studies … is a source of uncertainty in human health risk assessment... Conventional animal tests are, in general, quite time consuming, costly in both economic and animal welfare terms, and offer little mechanistic understanding of how chemicals act in the body." and adds "instead of focusing on signs of gross toxicity at high doses in living animals, an alternative, '21st century' approach advocated by leading scientific and regulatory authorities … is to work towards a mechanistic understanding of how chemicals interact with cellular  response pathways in the human body at environmentally relevant exposure levels".
The European commission hopes that advances in biology (molecular and cellular) will progress in the search of the replacemen to animal experiments.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/dec/31/animal-research-alternatives