Determination of eye irritation potential of low-irritant products: comparison of in vitro results with the in vivo draize rabbit test

in an attempt to build the evaluation strategies to assess the human eye irritation, a reassessment of some in vitro tests is necessary, particularly concerning the non-irritants, mild and moderate irritants. thus, the correlations between results obtained from the draize test with the in vitro methods het-cam (hens egg test-chorion allantonic membrane) and rbc haemolysis assay to assess the ocular irritancy potential of 20 eye drops were examined. parameters such as accuracy (%) and specificity (%) were determined. all results were correlated with rbc correctly with the results obtained in the draize test. the het-cam presented four false-positive results, showing a tendency of data overestimation. despite the high specificity provided mainly by the rbc, it would be necessary to test a wider range of products representing all the scales of irritation to confirm its ability to be used as a first alternative to test products that could be presumptive non-irritants.