European Union and United States cooperate in toxicology research for safer and quicker test on chemical substances -

Stricter environmental regulations in order to use of chemicals more safely bring the need for new methods for toxicological screening. The European Commission Directorate General for Research and the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) published coordinated Calls for research proposals to meet this need. The indicative budgets are about 3.5 M€ for the EC Call and 5 M$ (3,415 M€) for the US EPA Call.

In the US very few chemicals among the 80000 on the market have been tested and in Europe up to 30 000 chemicals have to be registered by 2011 in compliance with the new REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals) regulation. New strategies have to be designed to handle and interpret substantial amounts of information using integrated methods combining in vitro and in silico (i.e. computational) testing with in vivo data.

The European Call focuses on methods for high throughput screening in order to prioritise substances of high concern as fast as possible. The reliability and applicability domains of existing and new estimation methods will be characterised for hazard and risk assessment to assess their usefulness in relation to the EC Chemical Inventory.

The US Call objective is to develop, in conjunction with in vivo data, in vitro and in silico predictive models. The aim is to integrate biochemical and cellular response data to estimate toxicological risks resulting from exposure to pollutants and toxicants. Therefore scientists have to develop high-performance computing technologies and combine them with theoretical or applied mathematic techniques.

Selected projects from the two Calls will establish scientific cooperation activities that will be supervised by the EC and the US EPA. The results of the projects are expected to enhance our capability of fast screening of the toxicological properties of industrial chemicals.

This is a first concrete result of the Implementing Agreement established between the European Commission and the US EPA in scientific cooperation.

The European Commission Call for Proposals will be accessible through: http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/environment/home_en.html by searching for the new Call of the Environment (inc. Climate Change) Theme – sub-activity 6.3.3.

Background information on the US EPA programme can be found on the website: http://www.epa.gov/nheerl/humanhealth/HHRS_final_web.pdf and computational toxicology on: http://www.epa.gov/comptox/comptox_framework.html