The EU’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) has published a knowledge base of more than 550 non-animal models used for research into neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
Co-ordinated by the JRC's EU Reference Laboratory for alternatives to animal testing (EURL ECVAM), the document (plus dataset) features a collection of models taken from 567 journal articles out of 13,000 screened abstracts.
The publication is the third in a series of seven by the JRC on the use of non-animal models worldwide in biomedical research. The previous publications were on breast cancer and respiratory disease.
Although the majority of the models involve in vitro, cell-based technology, a growing number of examples make use of computer simulation, or growing patient cells outside the body, such as studying brain tissue to visualise the protein clumping, a typical characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease.