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Book Review: New Technologies for Toxicity Testing

The editors of the book were all associated with FRAME (Fund for the Replacement of Animals in Medical Experiments, Nottingham NG1 4EE, UK), so the methods advocated and discussed in New Technologies for Toxicity Testing are predominantly in vitro methods or other advanced non-animal methods, which permit reduction or refinement in the use of laboratory animals in toxicity testing. The book is more than welcome, since there is increasing doubt about the quality or relevance to humans of data produced by in vivo toxicity testing in animals. These deficits have triggered, on the one hand, in the USA, the new vision of Toxicity Testing in the 21st Century, and on the other hand, in Europe, the implementation of new policies for safety testing without animals for cosmetics and chemicals, in line with, for example, the 7th Amendment to the EU Cosmetics Directive and the new EU REACH legislation on chemicals. The editors invited prominent European and American experts to provide information on the current state of development of advanced technologies for toxicity testing. In the first chapter, on Advances in Tissue Culture, Glyn Stacey, from the Division of Cell Biology and Imaging of the National Institute for Biological Standards and Control, South Mimms, UK, stresses that systems that are able to reflect the range of specific tissue types and diseases in vitro, are most useful for target organ toxicity and drug efficacy testing. Stacey also discusses techniques for scaling-up cultures to provide a sufficient number of cells for highthroughput screening, or for scaling-down cultures for single cell studies, e.g. for biosensor and ‘cellon-a-chip’ applications. He also covers alternatives to using fetal calf serum in tissue culture media, in order to decrease batch-to-batch variation in medium content and to avoid the exposure of animals to painful procedures. In the second chapter, Tina Stummann and Susanne Bremer, from the European Centre for the Validation of Alternative Methods (ECVAM) at the EC Joint Research Centre, Ispra, Italy, discuss examples for the use of adult and embryonic stem cells in embryotoxicity, cardiotoxicity, hepatotoxicity and neurotoxicity testing. The authors consider the advantages of stem cells in comparison to primary or immortalised cells, such as the ability to form large populations of stable differentiated cells representative of different target species, including humans. In this chapter, recent improvements to the validated embryonic stem cells test (EST) for developmental toxicity testing are discussed, including the use of human embryonic stem cells, as well as the ethical issues, which must be considered when embryonic stem cells of human origin are to be used. Uwe Marx, from the TissUse biotech company in Berlin, Germany, describes the development of ‘dynamic bioreactors’ as an approach to improving the ability of cell culture systems to mimic both in vivo structures and physiological conditions. Future systems will have to provide an efficient oxygen and nutrient supply, but also a micro-environment which will support the modelling of in vivo communication among cells, as well as the cellular architectures of individual tissues and their spatial organisation. Marx provides encouraging examples, including a miniaturised membranebased perfusion bioreactor model of the human lymph node, and discusses the idea of modelling an organ in culture consisting of its basic structural ATLA 40, 63–65, 2012 63