A chronic shortage of funding is holding up the approval of non-animal methods for testing the safety of chemicals, a leading expert has claimed.

Speaking at ICT2022, in Maastricht, Netherlands, Helena Kandarova, president of the European Society for Toxicology In Vitro, said greater acceptance by regulators of new approach methodologies (NAMs) is being prevented by a lack of funding for validation – most NAMs are unvalidated, meaning there is no proof that they are accurate and repeatable.

As reported in Chemical Watch, Kandarova said: “Nobody is really funding validation… You want to validate your model? There is no money.”

EARA executive director, Kirk Leech, said: “It is ironic that the comments were made in the Netherlands, where Government targets to replace animals in research and use alternatives models instead, have constantly been revised, because many of these alternatives simply do not yet exist.”

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