In Vivo Testing  

Our Goals

The goal of effects testing is to find the concentration of an ingredient that makes plants and animals in the environment sick. Scientists do this to make sure ingredients are well below the concentration in the environment. To avoid the use of animals, P&G scientists are working on developing in vitro methods. Since organisms are made up of cells, cells are used in effects tests to try to find the concentration that makes cells sick. Hopefully, this concentration is the same as the concentration making the whole organism sick. This research has been ongoing in human health with some limited success.

Challenges

It is a challenge to use just the cells of one organ to tell us how another organ of the body would respond to a chemical. Further, living organisms are very complex and only function when all the cells of the body are working together. Finally, some organs, like the liver, can take a chemical and change its toxicity or can remove the chemical from the body. These interactions among organs make it difficult to develop one or a few in vitro techniques to provide effects data for one species of fish, much less to provide toxicity data on multiple species of fish and invertebrates. While this task is complex and difficult, the industry is working to develop these methods and reduce animal testing.