Posted: November 27, 2017 Updated Acute Systemic Toxicity Section on AltTox Dr. John ‘Jack’ R. Fowle has published a new section on AltTox, “Acute Systemic Toxicity: Regulatory Testing Overview.” Highlights include two recent U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) policy initiatives: 1) EPA’s intent (along with five other U.S. agencies) to move away from “the commonly […]
Posted: September 5, 2017 The US Food & Drug Administation’s (FDA) is working to modernize and improve drug safety and efficacy assessment methods by developing and implementing new scientific approaches. Three ongoing FDA programs are described below, and in one case, an additional modification is suggested. Cardiotoxicity Testing and the CiPA Initiative Current methods required […]
Posted: April 23, 2017* An assembly of around 1000 scientists, policy-makers, and animal advocates from around the world will have the opportunity to come together from August 20-24, 2017 in Seattle, Washington for the 10th World Congress on Alternatives and Animal Use in the Life Sciences. The deadline of April 24, 2017 for abstract submission […]
Posted: February 20, 2017 Convergence of the BRAIN Initiative and the Human Cell Atlas Identification of all of the cell types in the human brain is an important part of the BRAIN Initiative, and the growing number of researchers using single cell transcriptomics to identify cell sub-populations in the human brain is providing insight into […]
Posted: October 31, 2016 An international group of renowned researchers met in London on October 13-14, 2016 to discuss building the Human Cell Atlas. But, you might ask, what is the big deal about a new database to catalogue all of the types of cells in the human body? It is a big deal, and […]
Posted: September 25, 2016 In late July, Beta Bionics, a Boston startup developing an artificial pancreas device for type I diabetes, became the first company to raise $1 million from 775 different investors using the new crowdfunding rules (Rosenblum, 2016). By August 13, three U.S. companies were reported to have reached the annual $1 million […]
Posted: August 25, 2016 In 2007 the National Research Council (NRC) published the seminal report, Toxicity Testing in the 21st Century: A Vision and a Strategy, which envisioned using information derived from human-based assays and models to provide a more efficient, predictive, and less costly system for assessing the effects of xenobiotics on human health. […]
Posted: July 1, 2016 The Human Connectome Project The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) celebrated the completion of the first phase of their Human Connectome Project this month with a one-half day symposium on June 20 (available now by videocast). The Human Connectome Project (HCP), launched in 2009, is part of the NIH Blueprint […]
Posted: May 31, 2016 One of our content updates this month is an updated version of AltTox’s Table of Validated & Accepted Alternative Methods (“Table”). This Table, which provides a comprehensive list of alternative methods endorsed as scientifically valid by ICCVAM (United States), EURL ECVAM (European Union), and/or JaCVAM (Japan), has become one of the […]
Posted: April 25, 2016 Around 10,000 different proteins have been identified in each of eleven examined human cell lines (Beck et al., 2011; Geiger et al., 2012). These cellular proteins are not sloshing around in a chaotic fashion, but are highly organized into sub-cellular domains or compartments, and their activities are part of one or […]
Posted: April 1, 2016 The National Toxicology Program (NTP), an interagency program under the National Institutes of Environmental and Health Sciences (NIEHS) is organizing, April 26-27, 2016, the workshop, Addressing Challenges in the Assessment of Botanical Dietary Supplement Safety. The workshop will convene experts from government, industry, and other organizations to discuss the “challenges” and […]
Posted: February 17, 2016 At a kick-off meeting in January, the EU launched ToxRisk, a six-year, public-private partnership with 30 million euro in funding, and a mandate to eliminate animal testing in chemical safety assessment. The international consortium is comprised of 39 member institutions – including universities, research institutions, regulatory agencies, and large and small […]
Posted: December 28, 2015 For the final “In the Spotlight” article of 2015, we asked AltTox Editorial Board members to identify what they saw as the most significant development for non-animal chemical safety testing, in the realms of technology or policy. Here is what some of them had to say. Bas Blaauboer: “An important step […]
Posted: November 24, 2015 An urgent need for new drugs Tuberculosis (TB) is second only to HIV in deaths, worldwide, from an infectious disease. According to the World Health Organization, more than 9 million people fell ill with tuberculosis and 1.5 million died from this disease in 2013. On the other hand, new cases of […]
Editor’s note: AltTox.org thanks the European Commission’s Community Research and Development Information Service (CORDIS), publishers of Research*EU Results magazine, for permission to repost this interview with Dr. Robert Rallo. The interview appears in the October 2015 issue (#46, page 4), which features a number of interviews and articles on non-animal test methods. Professor Robert Rallo, […]
Posted: October 14, 2015 The purpose of the International Foundation for Ethical Research (IFER) Graduate Fellowship Program is “to provide financial incentives to graduate students in science that encourage them at the earliest stages of their career to integrate innovation and discovery with ethics and respect for animals.” IFER Graduate Fellowships are awarded annually (see […]
Acute systemic toxicity refers to the adverse reactions that occur within 24 hours of oral or dermal exposure to a substance, or within 4 hours of inhalation exposure. In traditional toxicity testing procedures it is measured by the median lethal dose (LD50 for oral or dermal routes of exposure, or LC50 – median lethal concentration […]
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) establishes guidance for commerce and trade between its 34 member countries, which include countries in Europe, the United States, Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and South Korea, with Brazil, India, Indonesia, the People’s Republic of China and South Africa participating as Key Partners. Guidance for assessing […]
Reprinted from Environmental Factor, July 2015, with permission. Members of the Interagency Coordinating Committee on the Validation of Alternative Methods (ICCVAM) discussed alternatives for chemical and product safety testing during a May 27 public forum at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Participants discussed subjects such as transparency in industry’s reporting of animal […]
Posted: May 29, 2015 The #authenticate Campaign to Improve Research Reproducibility Analysis by the Global Biological Standards Institute (GBSI) indicates that hundreds of millions of dollars in US government research funding is being compromised due to the use of contaminated and/or misidentified cell lines. Various researchers from academia and industry have recently committed to work […]
Posted: April 10, 2015 A March 12, 2015 news release by the UK government announced that “testing of household products on animals will be banned.” This new animal testing ban will come into effect in October 2015. It will apply to all finished household products, including “detergents, polishes and cleaning products, laundry products, air fresheners, […]
Industry, small and medium-sized enterprises and academia are coming together, through the NC3Rs CRACK IT program, to solve three challenges faced by the pharmaceutical and chemical industries; all of which should reduce the number of animals used in scientific research. Nine research and development consortia have been awarded up to £100,000 each, as part of […]
Posted: February 13, 2015 The exponential proliferation of biomedical data in scientific literature and public databases make systematic reviews more necessary than ever. At the same time, a corresponding proliferation of powerful computing aids to search, aggregate, and evaluate this literature make systematic reviews increasingly thorough and useful. In the field of toxicology especially, systematic […]
Posted: February 6, 2015 In an effort to help expand the acceptance of alternative methods for acute toxicity testing, EPA’s Office of Pesticide Programs has released a new draft guidance document. The agency is accepting comments on the draft guidance for 60 days, until March 10, 2015. With the rapid advances in science and continual […]
This article appeared in the January 2015 issue of the NIEHS newsletter, Environmental Factor and is reprinted here with permission. Posted: January 15, 2015 Finding alternatives to animal testing Federal agencies work to reduce the use of animals in research and testing. Methods that use fewer or no animals, or that reduce animal pain and […]
Editor’s note: ECHA’s Tiiu Bräutigam interviewed Robert Landsiedel (BASF, Germany) and Wim de Jong (National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, the Netherlands) for this article in the December issue of the ECHA Newsletter. Our thanks to ECHA for permission to republish the article for AltTox readers. You can read the entire December issue, […]
Almost £400,000 has been awarded across four research projects working to better understand the basic biology of human asthma – without the use of traditional mammalian models. The latest of the NC3Rs strategic award schemes has challenged scientists to approach asthma research questions in a completely novel way, encouraging them to seek alternatives to the […]
Published: November 25, 2014 On October 27, 2014, the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) published a short article titled “Clarity on interface between REACH and the Cosmetics Regulation” (ECHA/NA/14/46). The ECHA clarification, in full, was the following: “To meet the requirements of the new Cosmetics Regulation (Regulation (EC) No 1223/2009) cosmetic products are prohibited to be […]
Posted: October 15, 2014 Peggy Cunniff, President of the International Foundation for Ethical Research (IFER), and Peter O’Donovan, Executive Director of IFER, announced this week the funding of three new graduate fellowships, and the renewal of three fellowships awarded in previous years. The awards are based on recommendations of the IFER Scientific Advisory Board following […]
