The Use of the Bovine Isolated Cornea as a Possible In Vitro Test for Occular Irritancy

Over the last few years several groups of workers have endeavored to devise a replacement for the Draize eye test (1 ) in order to reduce the numbers of experiments carried out in vivo in fulfillment of safety requirements for medicinal preparations, toiletries, and cosmetics that might, either by intention or by accident, come into contact with human eyes. The method described below uses slaughterhouse material, namely bovine isolated corneas, thus obviating the necessity to use laboratory animals. The test is based on the premise that corneas opacify when exposed to deleterious substances. Preliminary experiments comparing the results obtained for the same compounds using both the Draize eye test and the bovine isolated cornea test were encouraging (2 ) (see Note 1 ).