Animal-derived products in science and current alternatives
Abstract
More than fifty years after the 3Rs definition and despite the continuous implementation of regulatory measures, animals continue to be widely used in basic research. Their use comprises not only in vivo experiments with animal models, but also the production of a variety of supplements and products of animal origin for cell and tissue culture, cell-based assays, and therapeutics. The animal-derived products most used in basic research are fetal bovine serum (FBS), extracellular matrix proteins such as Matrigel™, and antibodies. However, their production raises several ethical issues regarding animal welfare. Additionally, their biological origin is associated with a high risk of contamination, resulting, frequently, in poor scientific data for clinical translation. These issues support the search for new animal-free products able to replace FBS, Matrigel™, and antibodies in basic research. In addition, in silico methodologies play an important role in the reduction of animal use in research by refining the data previously to in vitro and in vivo experiments. In this review, we depicted the current available animal-free alternatives in in vitro research.
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Animal-generated antibodies and serum-derived albumin supplements can introduce poorly characterized, batch-variable backgrounds that affect assay performance and data interpretation.
“Likewise, animal-generated antibodies and serum-derived albumin supplements can introduce poorly characterized, batch-variable backgrounds that affect assay performance and data interpretation (Gray et al., 2020; DeLuca et al., 2021; Duarte et al., 2023; Nezvedova et al., 2025; Akuta et al., 2026).”
From Challenges and solutions in transitioning to animal-free standards: a comprehensive analysis of components in human cell-based developmental neurotoxicity assays (2026) · cites this paper as Duarte et al., 2023
Cites
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- Authors
- Duarte, A. C., Costa, E. C., Filipe, H. A. L., Saraiva, S. M., Jacinto, T., Miguel, S. P., Ribeiro, M. P., & Coutinho, P.
- Venue
- Biomaterials Advances
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2023-08
- Volume
- 151
- Pages
- 213428
- ISSN
- 2772-9508
- Cited by
- 111
- References
- 9
- Language
- en
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Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
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