ABSTRACT
During the last decade, tissue engineering became a progressing field in biotechnological research. The vision of medical treatment of burns patients, the treatment of ulcers, and the idea of reconstructing damaged organs revealed very rapidly further possibilities. Tissues not only resembled morphologically the situation in vivo but also revealed comparable physiology. This made artificial tissues interesting for testing efficacy of pharmaceutical and cosmetics products. The development of the tissue models was paralleled by an increasing demand in using alternative methods for the identification of toxicological hazards inherent to raw material, with the vision to replace animal testing for human safety assessment in toto. Increasing efforts were made to validate such alternatives against the existing animal tests. Some of those are already successful, others though promising, need further refinement. As the major field of applications for the cosmetic industry is doubtlessly the surface epithelial lining of humans, i.e., skin and the mucous membranes of mouth and eye, progress in reconstructing such models is followed thoroughly, and applications for these alternatives are evaluated extensively.
