Thank you for the question.
The world is burgeoning with these new approach methods right now, and this is our opportunity to really put that into law, to put it int writing, that we need to start using these methods. Until these methods go into regulatory acceptance—and this is one of the bottlenecks in the field, in every country, really.... We have all these amazing technologies being developed that are better predictive of human biology, but they are not being incorporated into regulatory risk assessment as fast as they should.
If we could strengthen our language to solidify that and not leave any space for interpretation or misinterpretation, and use every opportunity we can to replace and reduce the use of animals with practicable and scientifically justified methods and put these into our regulatory risk assessment process, that would get us a long way.
When you're thinking, perhaps, about revisiting this bill 20 years from now, some other countries in the world will have already ended animal testing, and we cannot be following these countries all the time. We need to take a lead and show how we can do that, so there are several different areas where the bill can be strengthened to ensure that we focus on the replacement and reduction of animals using these new methods.