CIT Joins Toxicity Prediction Project

CIT, a leading non-clinical CRO is joining 13 other industrial and academic partners in a 10 million Euro five-year research and development project to address the unmet need for test methods for predicting toxicity of drugs, chemicals and cosmetic ingredients. The project, ScreenTox (Stem Cells for Relevant, Efficient, Extended & Normalised Toxicology), will receive funding within the Health Programme of the European Commission’s 7th RTD Framework Programme for the project which is coordinated by Inserm, the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research.

“The evaluation of toxicants calls for new models that will allow assessing toxicity pathway responses in vitro,” said Marc Peschanski, a leading scientist in the field of toxicity and coordinator of the network. “Derivatives of pluripotent stem cell lines are likely to be the best candidates to implement this new strategy, as these most relevant and reliable model systems can also be robust and scalable in order to meet the challenges of industrial-scale screens.”

Roy Forster, CIT’s scientific Director, also added “We believe that ScreenTox will demonstrate advantages in using stem cells to assess how safe new products will be for use on humans, and in refining, reducing or even replacing the use of animals for testing.”

The project will be funded as part of a research cluster with an overall budget of 50 million Euro. This cluster covers seven projects and represents a unique joint effort from the European Commission and the European Cosmetic Association (COLIPA).