FDA Joins Chemical Screening Effort

FDA has joined the Tox21 collaboration, a multiagency effort to better predict the effects of chemicals on human health and the environment. The effort, which began in 2008, relies on high-throughput robotic screening and computational models to assess the toxicity of chemicals without animal testing. Other federal agencies involved in the collaboration include EPA, the National Toxicology Program, and NIH’s Chemical Genomics Center. FDA brings expertise in regulatory science, toxicology, and informatics to the collaboration. The agency will help prioritize which chemicals need toxicity testing and will help develop computational models for predicting toxicity. “This partnership builds upon FDA’s commitment to developing new methods to evaluate the toxicity of the substances we regulate,” noted Janet Woodcock, director of FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation & Research.