Animal testing can be replaced with Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Deep Learning, said P. Rama Rao, Dean, GITAM Institute of Pharmacy, while delivering a lecture in the regional training programme for Committee for Control and Supervision of Experiments on Animals (CCSEA) organised by the Ministry of Fisheries, Animal Husbandry and Dairying, Government of India, at GITAM deemed to be University here on Friday.
While around 20 million animal subjects are used in biomedical research in the entire world, use of animals in research has been questioned by the scientific community due to concerns like clinical validity, application and ethical issues, he added.
He pointed out that according to the legislation signed by U.S. President Joe Biden in late December 2022, new medicines need not be tested on animals to receive U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval, which is a major shift from animal use after more than eight decades of drug safety regulation.
Toxicity prediction models using AI is a new concept that will aid in achieving scientific accord and meeting regulatory applications. With the enormous progress made within the realm of AI and its application in fields such as medicine and chemistry, these alternatives to animal models are revealing their full potential, he said.
As part of the training programme, an interactive session with the Institutional Animals Ethics Committees (IAEC) and certificate distribution ceremony was conducted. The training programme coordinator M. Rama Rao, V. Ganapathi Rao and CCSEA consultants participated in the event.
