New publication: Minimizing experimental testing on fish for legacy pharmaceuticals

Lead by Anja Coors, a team of partners in the IMI-funded project ‘Prioritisation and risk evaluation of medicines in the environment’ (PREMIER) developed and recently published a decision tree that shall help to minimize animal testing within PREMIER and beyond. The risk-driven decision tree uses a combination of experimental testing with non-vertebrates and a fish-specific in silico model, the fish plasma model. Based on a verification data set for 96 APIs, we show that by applying the decision tree to a list of prioritized human-use pharmaceuticals, the need for fish testing could potentially be reduced by around 35% without lowering the level of environmental protection. Continuing work in PREMIER aims to apply, validate and refine this decision tool.

For further information, read the open access publication in Environmental Science & Technology:

Coors, A., Brown, A.R., Maynard, S.K., Nimrod Perkins, A., Owen, S., Tyler, C.R. (2023). Minimizing experimental testing on fish for legacy pharmaceuticals. Environmental Science & Technology 57, 1721-1730.

For further information on the project PREMIER, see here.

For additional new publications, see ECT’s publication list.