U.S. EPA and Unilever Announce Major New Research Collaboration to Advance Non-Animal Approaches for Chemical Risk Assessment
September 08 2015 - 09:00AM
Business Wire
Research collaboration will develop
ground-breaking scientific approaches to better assess the safety
of chemicals found in some consumer products without using animal
data
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Unilever
announce a research collaboration to develop ground-breaking
scientific approaches to better assess the safety of chemicals
found in some consumer products without using animal data.
The alternative and cutting-edge approaches, which EPA and
Unilever are developing, represent the first steps in a paradigm
shift for chemical safety testing and risk assessment by making
them faster, cheaper, and more relevant to humans. These new tools
will provide a robust scientific basis for assessing and managing
chemical safety and efficiently quantifying human health risks for
thousands of chemicals.
EPA and Unilever will develop a series of case studies based on
chemicals of mutual interest. EPA will develop and provide data
using these automated chemical screening technologies. Unilever
will use its longstanding expertise in consumer products to
estimate exposures for the chemicals. Together, the EPA and
Unilever will work to combine the information into a risk
assessment. The collaboration will help inform how EPA’s ToxCast
project can be used by private and public entities as well as in
the development of chemical risk assessments.
Unilever is contributing over $800,000 and considerable
scientific expertise to help generate and integrate new exposure
data to develop a model approach for high throughput risk
assessments that include both hazard and exposure predictions. The
Unilever initiative comes from its Safety and Environmental
Assurance Centre which, as it celebrates its 25th year of existence
in 2015, sees this research area of non-animal approaches as being
one of the enduring ‘big scientific challenges’ that has shaped its
evolution over the past quarter of a century (see:
www.tt21c.org).
Julia Fentem, Vice President of Unilever’s Safety and
Environmental Assurance Centre, said, “This research collaboration
is strategically very important for Unilever’s long-held ambition
to eliminate the need for any animal testing while also continuing
to ensure the safety of consumers and our environment. If we had
robust scientific tools to accurately and rapidly predict exposures
to chemicals at the cellular and molecular levels within the human
body, this would be a huge step forward in being able to conduct
safety risk assessments without using animal data.”
The collaboration will use data from EPA’s ToxCast program and
the affiliated Tox21 consortium, which is a collaboration among
EPA, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Food and Drug
Administration (FDA). These programs use automated chemical
screening technologies to rapidly and efficiently test thousands of
chemicals for their effects on human cells or cellular components
that are critical to normal function. Data from these technologies
are then incorporated into computational models to predict
potential adverse health effects and estimate the amount of
chemical that may cause these effects.
The new collaboration aims to incorporate elements that have
been previously missing from the automated chemical screening
approach such as tools for incorporating metabolism of the test
chemicals and a more comprehensive evaluation of the human
biological pathways that can be affected.
“If successful, research from this collaboration will result in
better ways to evaluate the potential human health effects of new
ingredients and chemicals we currently know little about,” said Dr.
Russell Thomas, Director of EPA's National Center for Computational
Toxicology. “These methods could be used by both industry and
governmental agencies to reduce the costs associated with safety
testing and accelerate the pace of chemical risk assessment.”
About Unilever:
Unilever is one of the world’s leading suppliers of Food, Home
and Personal Care products with sales in over 190 countries and
reaching 2 billion consumers a day. It has 172,000 employees and
generated sales of €48.4 billion in 2014. Over half (57%) of the
company’s footprint is in developing and emerging markets. Unilever
has more than 400 brands found in homes around the world, including
Persil, Dove, Knorr, Domestos, Hellmann’s, Lipton, Wall’s, PG Tips,
Ben & Jerry’s, Marmite, Magnum and Lynx.
Unilever’s Sustainable Living Plan (USLP) commits to:
Decoupling growth from environmental impact.
Helping more than a billion people take action to improve their
health and well-being.
Enhancing the livelihoods of millions of people by 2020.
Unilever was ranked number one in its sector in the 2014 Dow
Jones Sustainability Index. In the FTSE4Good Index, it achieved the
highest environmental score of 5. It led the list of Global
Corporate Sustainability Leaders in the 2014
GlobeScan/SustainAbility annual survey for the fourth year running,
and in 2015 was ranked the most sustainable food and beverage
company in Oxfam’s Behind the Brands Scorecard.
Unilever has been named in LinkedIn’s Top 3 most sought-after
employers across all sectors.
For more information about Unilever and its brands, please visit
www.unilever.com. For more information on the USLP:
www.unilever.com/sustainable-living/.
About EPA:
EPA’s safer chemicals research conducts cutting-edge science to
address the impacts of existing chemicals, anticipate impacts of
new chemicals, and evaluate complex interactions of chemical and
biological systems to better protect human health and the
environment. For more information visit -
http://www2.epa.gov/chemical-research.
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version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20150908005307/en/
For more information about this research
collaboration:Unilever:Jaime Stein,
201-894-7760MediaRelations.USA@unilever.comorEPA:thomas.russell@epa.gov
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