Advancing non-animal testing methods: first set of novel knowledge tools published

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has recently published the first five adverse outcome pathways (AOP), three of which have been developed by the JRC. The AOPs are novel knowledge management tools in toxicology and are useful for supporting risk assessment to human health. They are also valuable for helping to avoid animal testing through the use of alternative methods.

An adverse outcome pathway, or AOP, is a highly structured way of describing a toxicological process which can lead to an adverse health effect in humans or wildlife, caused by an unsafe exposure to a chemical substance. Essentially an AOP tells a toxicological story in terms of a logical sequence of causally-linked 'key events' that occur at different levels of biological organisation, from perturbations at the molecular scale up to effects occurring in a whole organism or a population. The AOPs developed by the JRC, now published by OECD, relate to chemical-induced liver fibrosis, aspects of neurotoxicity in adults, and certain neurotoxicological effects that can be caused during human development.

See more: ec.europa.eu/jrc