Academic and SME partnership advances and improves chemical safety assessment

Laws require chemicals to be safety tested to authorise their manufacture or importing (e.g., UK- and EU-REACH), with most current regulations relying heavily on animal testing. Mammalian animal tests are typically slow and expensive; estimations vary, but mandatory testing of new chemicals in the US can cost up to $3,000,000, with tens of thousands of new chemicals being brought to market each year. Such testing also frequently provides only limited insights into toxicity, such as death of an animal after short-term high-exposure and cannot provide insight into more nuanced toxicological effects.

Academics from the University of Birmingham and partners aQuaTox-Solutions and the University spin-out Michabo Health Science Limited are working towards changing this paradigm, developing next-generation risk assessment using chemical grouping and hazard prediction applications of omics-enhanced fish cell testing. The Environmental Risk Assessment of Chemicals as Alternatives to Long-Term Animal Tests Using Fish (ExCell) initiative is funded by Innovate UK and InnoSuisse to develop alternative, cell-based methods for application in environmental risk assessment of chemicals.

The ExCell project seeks to provide alternatives for long-term animal tests. Instead of using fish, the project will explore the use of fish gill cells for chemical testing, applying omics and computational toxicology technologies for assessing mechanisms of toxicity. This approach combines "omics" technologies (in part conducted at Phenome Centre Birmingham, University of Birmingham) that measure thousands of molecular responses to chemical exposure, with computational methods to analyse the data and derive information on chemical hazards.

The ExCell project comes at a fitting time, with the development of The European Commission currently developing a roadmap towards phasing out animal testing for chemical safety assessments, in response to the “Save Cruelty Free Cosmetics - Commit to a Europe Without Animal Testing” campaign. Academics from the Centre for Environmental Research and Justice (CERJ) represent the University of Birmingham across all working groups, and work from active projects such as PrecisionTox project and the Partnership for the Assessment of Risk from Chemicals (PARC) is used to evidence future approaches. This innovative activity in regulatory and governance spaces combined with state-of-the-art scientific approaches enables CERJ to support and develop more effective and efficient chemical safety assessment systems to safeguard human and environmental health.