The EPA and L'Oreal have announced a $1.2 million research collaboration designed to determine if the agency's chemical toxicity forecaster, ToxCast, can be used in systemic toxicity tests.
L’Oréal is providing the funding for the research as well as safety data from a set of representative substances from the cosmetics sector, expanding the types of chemical-use groups assessed by ToxCast. The cosmetics company will in turn look for ToxCast to provide predictive results on the safety of substances in its products, the EPA said.
EPA launched ToxCast in 2007 to develop ways to predict potential toxicity and to develop a cost-effective approach for prioritizing the thousands of chemicals that need toxicity testing. The program is able to screen thousands of chemicals in hundreds of tests and provide results that are relevant to various types of toxicity, saving on costs and time associated with animal testing, the agency says.
Data from animal studies can be searched and queried using EPA's Toxicity Reference Database (ToxRefDB), which stores nearly $2 billion worth of studies, according to the EPA website.
EPA researchers have published scientific papers showing how ToxCast can be used to predict a chemical’s potential for liver toxicity, developmental toxicity, reproductive toxicity and cancer, the EPA said.
L’Oréal has spent 30 years developing its animal-free toxicology testing, called the Predictive Evaluation for Safety. Its lab conducts new-generation tests using reconstructed human tissues, automated platforms, and molecular modeling.
Photo: EPA
