In silico methods - Computational alternatives to animal testing

A seminar and interactive workshop on “In silico Methods – Computational Alternatives to Animal Testing” was held in Berlin, Germany, organized by Annemarie Lang, Frank Butt- gereit and Andrea Volkamer at the Charite-Universitatsmedizin Berlin, on August 17-18, 2017. During the half-day seminar, the variety and applications of in silico methods as alternatives to animal testing were presented with room for scientific discus- sions with experts from academia, industry and the German fed- eral ministry (Fig. 1). Talks on computational systems biology were followed by detailed information on predictive toxicology in order to display the diversity of in silico methods and the potential to embrace them in current approaches (Hartung and Hoffmann, 2009; Luechtefeld and Hartung, 2017). The follow- ing interactive one-day Design Thinking Workshop was aimed at experts, interested researchers and PhD-students interested in the use of in silico as alternative methods to promote the 3Rs (Fig. 2). Forty participants took part in the seminar while the workshop was restricted to sixteen participants.