Big data study on animal testing with Bayer

While certain toxicities seen in animals are relevant to humans, many others are specific to the species, according to Dr. Matthew Clark, Director of Scientific Services at Elsevier. In the largest study of its kind, Dr. Clark and Dr. Thomas Steger-Hartmann, an investigational toxicologist at Bayer AG in Berlin, mined publicly available big data from regulatory submissions compiled in the PharmaPendium database to establish concordance, or consistency, between adverse events reported in animals and in humans. The result is a database that can help curb the amount of animal testing needed while still enabling companies to meet safety and regulatory requirements.