Ten years of the Animal Welfare Charter

6. Promising alternatives

What do the next ten years of the Animal Welfare Charter promise? New digital technologies have huge potential for the further reduction, refinement and replacement of animal experiments. It is already possible to investigate a lot of questions concerning new active substances today using computer-based simulation models. Likewise promising are in vitro methods such as organ-on-a-chip technology, in which miniature organs are artificially recreated from stem cells and placed on a small chip to model the inner workings of the human body. With the aid of these chips, drug candidates can be tested for efficacy and toxicity at an early stage. The technology is still in its infancy, so it is only possible at present to bring four or five organs together on one chip – a fraction of the human body. In order for this approach to be used in the future as an alternative in drug development, further progress therefore needs to be made in digital technologies. But the research interest is considerable. The search for alternative methods is worthwhile not only for the welfare of laboratory animals, but also for the companies, because these alternatives are usually less cost-intensive and easier to standardize than animal models. Increasingly innovative digital systems are also being used in the housing of laboratory animals to improve the welfare of the animals and at the same time to deliver more comprehensive and more conclusive data for the researchers. Even though animal experiments will not be replaced in the foreseeable future, these offer good prospects for animal welfare and scientific progress.