Contest Aims For Better Toxicity Tests

EPA has teamed up with NIH’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences and the National Toxicology Program to launch a $1 million challenge aimed at improving the predictive power of high-throughput chemical screening for toxicity testing. Most in vitro, human-cell-based assays used to screen chemicals for toxicity do not provide metabolism information, leading to low overall confidence in the results. The challenge aims to turn existing high-throughput assays into tests with physiologically relevant metabolites so that both the parent chemical and its metabolites are tested. In the first round of the competition, up to 10 winners will be awarded $10,000 each and invited to advance to the second round. Up to five finalists will be awarded up to $100,000 each in the second round. The winning finalist could be awarded up to $400,000 for developing a commercially viable approach.