Opportunities to reduce the use of animals in the potency and toxicity testing of toxoid vaccines

Alternative methods for titrating antitoxin are now available which should, in principle, permit a very large reduction in the numbers of animals required to lest the potency of toroid vaccines. More importantly they make it possible to eliminate the use of animals for the indication of excess toxicity almost completely. The full realisation of this potential is dependent upon the careful validation of all other methods and the introduction of more appropriate standard and reference preparations for titration of antisera and for the assay of DTP. it would be facilitated by a mechanism to facilitate the wider dissemination of relevant monoclonal antibodies and by a restructuring of veterinary vaccine potency tests to make full use of the additional serological information provided by the new methods.