In Vitro Test Systems for Identifying Potential Chemical Carcinogens

The development of in vitro test systems for evaluating the toxic, mutagenic, and carcinogenic potential of substances has led to a reduction of animal experiments besides of being better suited for many differentiated mechanistic investigations. In a pre-screening approach, substances which exhibit the aforementioned characteristics in vitro may be excluded from further studies in vivo. On the other hand, negative results obtained with in vitro test systems cannot be extrapolated to the animal or to the human situation with sufficient certainty. Thus, if a substance has proven to be nontoxic and non-mutagenic in vitro there is still the need to set up an animal experiment. In this review we report on suborganismic systems which have proven to be useful tools for evaluating the mutagenic and carcinogenic potential of chemicals which are relevant to human health