Hazards animal cell culture

This chapter discusses the range of health hazards associated with microorganisms and their products, the possible risk of genetic modification and animal cell culture and identifies areas of bioprocessing that may give rise to health hazards. 

Each of these hazards is discussed below in terms of symptoms and association with parts of bioprocessing. Other potential but unknown hazards such as dealing with animal cell culture and genetically-manipulated micro-organisms are also discussed. 

Plant cell culture is becoming a widely used technology for the production of plant biochemicals and also for the biotransformation of pharmaceuticals. The dangers posed to exposed workers by this technology will be entirely dependent on the products of these processes and possibly the by-products of the plant cells metabolism. Therefore the hazards of plant cell culture will probably be similar to those of animal cell culture discussed above. 

For many chemicals, their metabolism is the major determinant of the risk and for a number of hazardous compounds, there is a considerable knowledge from experimental studies on the relationship between metabolism and toxicity. In particular, in vitro studies using cell cultures, subcellular fractions, or pure enzymes have provided information on the nature of reactive intermediates as well as on detoxification pathways. Moreover, the significance of these processes has been demonstrated in several species of experimental animals and humans. 

The use of in vitro systems such as cell cultures, tissue slices, and cell lines has become of major importance for several reasons. First of all, the common practice of the use of experimental animal models for studying toxicity of chemicals meets serious and growing criticism for ethical and economic reasons. Toxicity studies aiming at performing a hazard or a risk assessment inevitably will include adverse effects and thus discomfort for the animals involved. Moreover, the cost of running an animal facility and performing toxicity studies is an increasingly important limitation. 

Alternative models include ex vivo eye preparations and in vitro cell cultures but all such alternatives require extensive validation before data can be used for hazard assessment. However, these models can be used as part of a tiered approach for eye irritancy testing, significantly reducing the number of animal studies required. 

Diagnosis of Q fever is usually accomplished by serologic testing because culture of C burnetii is potentially hazardous to laboratory personnel and requires animal inoculation or cell culture. 

Recently, alternative toxicity test methods using bacteria or cultured cells instead of biota itself have been developed for the purposes of animal welfare, convenience, cost saving and screening of hazardous chemicals. 

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