Assessment of cutaneous and ocular irritancy: a decade of research on alternatives to animal experimentation.

Over the past decade increasing societal and scientific pressure has promoted the development of alternatives to local tolerance testing in laboratory animals. The use of isolated organs, fertilized hen's eggs, and cell culture systems has been proposed as well as the study of a toxicant's biochemical effects and structure-activity relationships. This paper critically reviews the current status of these approaches and discusses the preliminaries for the establishment of alternative methods in the process of safety assessment.