EPA and Unilever: Teaming Up to Advance Chemical Safety

By Rusty Thomas

EPA researchers are using high-throughput screening methods to make chemical management safer.

There are somewhere around 80,000 chemicals listed or registered for use in the United States (plus an additional thousand more introduced every year), of which only a small percentage have been significantly tested for their relative safety.

That’s because we are still largely relying on methods for chemical testing that were developed 30 years ago that are expensive, time consuming, and rely heavily on the use of laboratory animals. I’m fortunate to work in a place filled with people trying to change that: EPA’s National Center for Computational Toxicology. Our Computational Toxicology research (CompTox) is aimed at finding new, more efficient, ways to test and screen chemicals, developing new techniques such as computer-based models and even robots-assisted high-throughput screening programs to make chemical management safer and faster by several orders of magnitude.

The success of EPA’s CompTox research has opened the door to partnerships with industries who are the experts at knowing how much of a chemical people are exposed to through their different products. In the past, we collaborated with L’Oreal to explore the safety of chemicals used in cosmetics. This week, we’re happy to announce a new partnership, with Unilever, a global consumer products company. Together, we are kicking off a research collaboration to advance chemical safety for consumer products.

EPA researchers will work with our Unilever partners to develop a series of case studies based on five chemicals of mutual interest. A major component will include using EPA’s Toxicity Forecaster (ToxCast), which uses automated chemical screening technologies to expose living cells or isolated proteins to chemicals, and then screening those cells or proteins for biological or structure changes that may suggest potential toxic effects.

While EPA uses the ToxCast program to develop and provide data, Unilever will use their expertise in consumer products to estimate exposures for each chemical. We can then marry these two, the dose and the exposure, to estimate the health risks.

If successful, research from this collaboration will result in better ways to evaluate the potential health effects of new ingredients and chemicals we currently know little about. These methods could be used by both industry and governmental agencies to reduce the costs associated with safety testing and ultimately address the thousands of untested chemicals in our environment. I am excited to be part of this partnership as we work to make  chemical safety testing faster, cheaper, and more relevant to people.

About the Author: Rusty Thomas is the director of the National Center for Computational Toxicology at the EPA.

from The EPA Blog http://ift.tt/1OaCyd8

By Rusty Thomas

EPA researchers are using high-throughput screening methods to make chemical management safer.

There are somewhere around 80,000 chemicals listed or registered for use in the United States (plus an additional thousand more introduced every year), of which only a small percentage have been significantly tested for their relative safety.

That’s because we are still largely relying on methods for chemical testing that were developed 30 years ago that are expensive, time consuming, and rely heavily on the use of laboratory animals. I’m fortunate to work in a place filled with people trying to change that: EPA’s National Center for Computational Toxicology. Our Computational Toxicology research (CompTox) is aimed at finding new, more efficient, ways to test and screen chemicals, developing new techniques such as computer-based models and even robots-assisted high-throughput screening programs to make chemical management safer and faster by several orders of magnitude.

The success of EPA’s CompTox research has opened the door to partnerships with industries who are the experts at knowing how much of a chemical people are exposed to through their different products. In the past, we collaborated with L’Oreal to explore the safety of chemicals used in cosmetics. This week, we’re happy to announce a new partnership, with Unilever, a global consumer products company. Together, we are kicking off a research collaboration to advance chemical safety for consumer products.

EPA researchers will work with our Unilever partners to develop a series of case studies based on five chemicals of mutual interest. A major component will include using EPA’s Toxicity Forecaster (ToxCast), which uses automated chemical screening technologies to expose living cells or isolated proteins to chemicals, and then screening those cells or proteins for biological or structure changes that may suggest potential toxic effects.

While EPA uses the ToxCast program to develop and provide data, Unilever will use their expertise in consumer products to estimate exposures for each chemical. We can then marry these two, the dose and the exposure, to estimate the health risks.

If successful, research from this collaboration will result in better ways to evaluate the potential health effects of new ingredients and chemicals we currently know little about. These methods could be used by both industry and governmental agencies to reduce the costs associated with safety testing and ultimately address the thousands of untested chemicals in our environment. I am excited to be part of this partnership as we work to make  chemical safety testing faster, cheaper, and more relevant to people.

About the Author: Rusty Thomas is the director of the National Center for Computational Toxicology at the EPA.

from The EPA Blog http://ift.tt/1OaCyd8