HUMAN CELL-TESTING allows drug testing

1. to be put on a MASS PRODUCTION scale!
2. to experiment with extension of the COMBINING technique which -- already! -- has boosted accuracy from 70% to 80%!
3. to implement the POWER OF COMBINATORIAL MATHEMATICS, which, for example, initiated an agricultural revolution in the 1930's!

An institution is dedicated to this enquiry: The Multicenter Evaluation of In Vitro Cytotoxicity (MEIC).. Under the MEIC auspices, researchers from the U. S., Europe, Japan, and other countries tried 68 different test-tube methods to predict the toxicity of those 50 drugs mentioned above -- whose apparent toxicity has been reported from poison center from any countries. The results were presented at the Conference of the Scandinavian Society for Cell Toxicity -- and anounced in September, 1996. HUMAN CELLS TEST WERE CLEARLY SUPERIOR!

The average human cell test was 77% accurate -- as opposed to the 59% for the Rat LD50 tests, and 70% for the mouse tests. The accuracy was boosted to 80% when results form three different human cells were combined. Three "models" of human cells have been submitted to testing for safety to human of pharmaceutical drugs:

1. CHANG CELLS, developed by Lourdes Garza-Arcanas of the Universidad Autonoma de Nuevo Leon, Mexico.
2. HL-60 CELLS, developed by Noriho Tanaka of the Hatano Food and Drug Safety Center in Kanagawa, Japan.
3. MRC-5 CELLS, developed by Paul Diericks of the Institute for Hygiene and Epidemiology in Brussels, Belgium.

(NOTE!!! The MEIC tests involve no CELLS developed by AMERICANS. But we learn about testing with American-grown human cells, below.)

Elsewhere, I describe how the production of new drugs is AUTOMATED. It is easy to see that this procedure can easily be adapted to testing HUMAN CELLS FOR REACTION TO DRUGS to DETERMINE THE SAFETY OF THESE DRUGS FOR HUMANS.

(I say "easy", but seeing may not be the problem. I note in that hyperlink that this technique was developed for successful protein and DNA research. Yet it took 20 years for pharmaceutical firms to try this procedure on production of drugs. So the problem may not be technical but administrative! And this is one reason I'm promoting this research on INTERNET. Your pressure could speed the work described in this file. If investors in pharmaceutical firms realized that continued animal research costs them money, then the situation would change!)

MEIC researchers also us human cell tests to assess

• how drugs pass from the digestive tract into the bloodstream;
• how drugs pass from the blood inot the brain;
• to measure the toxity of drug breakdown products.

PCRM notes that "Some human cell tests are already well established":

• The Eyetex system (developed by Virginia C. Gordon and colleagues at In Vitro International, Irvine, CA) replaces the "infamous" Draize test which drips chemicals into the eyes of rabbits to see if they are blinded or otherwise injured by them. An Eyetex vial contains chemicals which turn cloudy in reacting to irritating chemicals, as does the cornea of the eye. This test is faster and cheaper than animal tests and has a 98% predictive value.
• Pharmagene Laboratories (Ralston, England) was the first company to apply human tissues and computers exclusively to drug development and testing. Using tools from molecular biology, biochemistry, and analytical chemistry, Phosgene constructs extensive research

  1. into human genes,
  2. and how drugs affect the action of these genes,
  3. or how drugs affect the proteins these genes make.

(The PCRM article cited tells how to obtain more information from MEIC and from Phosgene.)

Human tissue can also replace animal tests in burn research.