The Advent of the Golden Era of Animal Alternatives

Integrating Philosophy of Science into Research on Ethical, Legal and Social Issues in the Life Sciences

“…The implementation of the 3R principle in science policy and self-regulation has, in conjunction with scientific and technological progress, in the last two decades generated many new ways to replace animal experimentation with non-animal-methods. Prominent examples include in vitro systems for assessing adverse effects of drugs, disease models based on human embryonic stem cells, organ(s)-on-a-chip-systems and sophisticated "read-across"-computer algorithms to predict toxicological properties of unknown chemical substances (see Butzke et al 2013;Polini et al 2014 for an overview). Despite these developments non-animal-methods have not led to an extensive replacement of animal experimentation.…”

Recent Advances in Aptasensing Strategies for Monitoring Phycotoxins: Promising for Food Safety

“…They are a member of extremely varied classes of small-to medium-sized organic compounds (300-3500 Da), mostly generated by dinoflagellates, diatoms, and cyanobacteria [1]. These toxins can behave like vectors that can move and accumulate in the water, fish, and shellfish as seafood is considered a severe threat to consumers due to some neurotoxic and diarrhetic effects or amnesic harm [2,3]. More than 1000 phycotoxins have been found and classified into eight groups based on their structure: azaspiracids (AZAs), brevetoxins (BTXs), cyclic imines, domoic acid (DA), okadaic corrosive (OA), pectenotoxins (PTXs), sax-itoxins (STXs), and yessotoxins (YTXs).…”