Open AccessIn Vitro Test Systems for Identifying Potential Chemical Carcinogens
Author(s) -
R. B. Becker,
Franz Oesch
Publication year - 1995
Publication title -
chimia
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2673-2424
pISSN - 0009-4293
DOI - 10.2533/chimia.1995.361
Subject(s) - carcinogen , in vitro , in vitro toxicology , human health , in vivo , animal testing , computational biology , biochemical engineering , toxicology , biology , microbiology and biotechnology , medicine , genetics , environmental health , engineering
The development of in vitro test systems for evaluating the toxic, mutagenic, and carcinogenic potential of substances has led to a reduction of animal experiments besides of being better suited for many differentiated mechanistic investigations. In a pre-screening approach, substances which exhibit the aforementioned characteristics in vitro may be excluded from further studies in vivo. On the other hand, negative results obtained with in vitro test systems cannot be extrapolated to the animal or to the human situation with sufficient certainty. Thus, if a substance has proven to be nontoxic and non-mutagenic in vitro there is still the need to set up an animal experiment. In this review we report on suborganismic systems which have proven to be useful tools for evaluating the mutagenic and carcinogenic potential of chemicals which are relevant to human health.