Abstrakt
The main objective for toxicology is to develop tests that can usefully contribute to the assessment of possible risk to human society when exposed to a new product. The risk not only entails the damaging human beings, but also the environment we occupy.
Traditional risk assessment is based on hazard identification and characterisation with exposure. For many years the main source of these data were experiments with laboratory animals.
Animal-based toxicological studies depend on observations of clinical, histopathological and functional changes in the laboratory animals after the exposure to the tested chemical. Toxicological evaluation of new chemicals by this way is extremely time consuming and expensive.
Nevertheless, law in many countries requires the use of laboratory animals for toxicological purposes.