EURL ECVAM Review of non-animal models in biomedical research - Cardiovascular diseases

Among non‐communicable diseases, CVDs are the major cause of death in Europe and worldwide, causing 32% of all deaths in the world. Experimental models are essential to understand disease mechanisms and to develop accurate diagnostic tests and novel therapies. Rodent models have been extensively exploited in basic cardiovascular research studies.Nevertheless, approximately only 25% of new drug programmes reach market authorisation, largely because of poor predictivity in humans mostly due to a lack of efficacy or unpredicted toxicity. The JRC’s EU Reference Laboratory for alternatives to animal testing (EURL ECVAM) has embarked on a study to identify and characterise current and emerging non-animal models and methods used in the CVD biomedical research domain.The EURL ECVAM study identified 449 publications as promising candidate methods according to carefully defined criteria.The review found that the predominant non-animal models used for CVD research are based on in silico models .As the technology and the computational power advance, in silico methods will be gaining more interest and application in a clinical context to pave the way for personalised medicine.