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 […]
