PETA India is expected to present information this week concerning the use of big data in lieu of animal testing in research at the “Breaking Barriers Through Bioinformatics and Computational Biology” conference at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi.

Because of the vast amounts of data now publicly available that can be used to determine the toxicity of chemicals without experimenting on animals, PETA hopes to use the forum to promote big data alternatives to animal testing.

Additionally, PETA plans to discuss the disadvantages of traditional animal testing methods and to encourage researchers and governments to share data and use the public data repositories available (PubChem, ChEMBL and TOXNET) to develop predictive toxicity models of chemical compounds.

According to PETA India's Dr. Rohit Bhatia, "Replacing animal-based methods of predicting toxicity with an advanced big data analytics approach will save time, money, and many animals' lives."