By Elie Dolgin

Animal experimentation remains an essential component of drug safety testing. But that doesn’t mean that pharmaceutical companies have to rely on the same old animal models. According to a panel of European experts, diminutive strains of domestic hogs called minipigs could provide more suitable platforms for toxicity testing than monkeys, dogs, rats and other species routinely used to gauge drug safety.

“There are many features of the minipig that make it more amenable for being a toxicology model,” says Roy Forster, chief scientific officer of the French contract research organization CIT. “If you had to start the field of toxicology all over again and you didn’t have the history and the tradition that we do, then the minipig would certainly be an animal that we would readily turn to.”

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