The Environmental Protection Agency has scrapped a plan to phase out mammal testing for studying chemical toxicity, Science reports. In 2019, the regulatory agency vowed to completely phase out animal testing for toxicology studies by 2035 in favor of non-animal “test subjects” programmed into computer models.
The call to challenge the status quo was controversial from the start — it not only was going to impact thousands of studies and experiments, but many scientists argued that computer models were nowhere near ready to replace animals as test subjects. In a letter written by a group of public health officials, the experts urged the EPA’s head Michael Regan to reconsider the ban because computational models, in their opinion, were “not yet developed to the point” where they could be relied on for risk assessments.
In order for the new ban to have taken effect, the EPA said there needed to be “scientific confidence” that non-animal models could soundly replace
