An educational program for the use of alternative methods to animal experimentation and testing

Abstract

Alternative methodology is a one of the scientific fields that is growing exponentially during the last years. Because of the robust quality, validity and human relevance of the data collected with alternatives these methods are more and more involved for safety proof purposes and included also into the field of regulatory toxicology.The continuing progress in the field of in vitro methods, e.g. high throughput and high content imaging methods and advanced knowledge in the field of systems biology, protein interactions and gene expression patterns (-omics) opened up new prospects especially in the field of toxicology to investigate pathway related and human relevant targets with methods alternative to animal testing. Thus, today the field alternatives is a multidisciplinary scientific field, which includes moral philosophy as well as genomics, transcriptiomics, proteomics, systems biology and also regulatory toxicology. Because of the resulting complexity of this most diversified field it is inevitable that the segmental knowledge has to be shared between many experts.However there are very few educational programs in the field of alternatives with relevance, i.e. which are comprehensive and embedded within the framework of scientific curricula.CAAT-Europe brought together key teachers in the field of alternative methods and engaged them to complement their expertise. The synergistic outcome with regard to specified target groups resulted in an advanced and comprehensive educational setup including different modules for different audience with different demands.