Research Activities

NIH Collaborates with EPA to Improve the Safety Testing of Chemicals
New Strategy Aims to Reduce Reliance on Animal Testing
Testing the safety of chemicals ranging from pesticides to household cleaners will benefit from new technologies and a plan for collaboration, according to federal scientists from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), who today announced a new toxicity testing agreement. The concept behind this agreement is highlighted in the Feb. 15, 2008 issue of the journal Science. Read more

ToxCast™ Program - Prioritizing Toxicity Testing of Environmental Chemicals
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has identified a clear need to develop methods to evaluate a large number of environmental chemicals (pesticides and others) for their potential toxicity. Doing so will enable EPA to prioritize the use of its limited testing resources on those chemicals that present the greatest likelihood of risk to human health and the environment. Read about ToxCast

Virtual Liver: Assessing for Risks
When scientists want to test the potential toxic effects that a chemical could have on humans, they often look first to the liver. As the key metabolic organ for transforming or metabolizing and helping the body process harmful substances that enter the bloodstream, the liver frequently shows the earliest signs of a chemical's affects on the body. Read about Virtual Liver

STAR-Funded Environmental Bioinformatics Research Centers
EPA's Science to Achieve Results (STAR) program has funded the Research Center for Environmental Bioinformatics and Computational Toxicology at the University of Medicine & Dentistry of New Jersey, and the Carolina Environmental Bioinformatics Research Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Read about the establishment of these two cutting-edge environmental bioinformatics research centers.

Computational Toxicology Presents New Start Awards
Following an ORD solicitation for research proposals to support the "Research Framework for a Computational Toxicology Research Program", the Computational Toxicology Implementation and Steering Committee (CTISC) selected seven projects for funding. These projects represent broad, multi-disciplinary efforts that collectively support the three objectives of the Framework, and present a balance of efforts directed at human and wildlife effects. Project awards followed an external scientific peer review and an internal relevancy review and were formally announced on January 11, 2005. Titles, Lead Investigators, and Project Abstracts are provided on the New Start Awards page.

Research Activities

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