More than 40% NCEs (new chemical entities) developed in pharmaceutical industry are practically insoluble in water, thus organic solvents are required to solubilise the drugs. But, the solvents interfere with the biological activity of the test drug and results in the toxicity. Therefore, the suitability of the solvent needs to be accessed for its toxicity. So far, the mammalian models have been used for screening the therapeutics drugs. But using the mammalian models involves problems interms of cost and moral issues. Hence, to overcome these problems we suggest silkworm as a model to evaluate the toxicity and the therapeutic effects of the chemicals. Hence, in the present study we used organic solvents like Ethanol, Acetonitrile, and DMSO to examine the toxicity of the solvents in the silkworm. The solvents were injected into the silkworm haemolymph and the preliminary tests were conducted to find out the median lethal dose (LD50) of the silkworm for 24h by probit analysis method. The LD50 values of ethanol, acetonitrile, DMSO is 10 µl/g, 1.99 µl/g, 19.95 µl/g. Our experiment successfully demonstrated that silkworm can be used as a model organism for evaluating the toxicity of solvents.
