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EPA, Unilever Partnering to Advance Non-Animal Methods of Chemical Risk Assessment

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Unilever have announced a research collaboration to develop groundbreaking scientific approaches to better assess the safety of chemicals found in some consumer products without using animal data.The alternative approaches 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.

By Sustainable Brands | Published 9 years ago | About a 3 minute read

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Unilever have announced a research collaboration to develop groundbreaking scientific approaches to better assess the safety of chemicals found in some consumer products without using animal data.

The alternative approaches 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; and they will work together 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 initiative comes from Unilever’s Safety and Environmental Assurance Centre which, as it celebrates its 25th year of existence in 2015, sees non-animal approaches to research as one of the enduring ‘big scientific challenges’ that has shaped its evolution over the past quarter-century.

Julia Fentem, VP 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.”

Safer chemicals are a growing concern for all stakeholders, many of which are taking steps to ensure their adoption: In June, a group of U.S. businesses representing more than $50 billion in investment and purchasing power began requiring their vendors, suppliers, and builders to use the Chemical Footprint Project Assessment Tool, which provides a common metric for publicly benchmarking chemical use and management, to measure usage of harmful chemicals in their products and production processes. And in July, Trucost released a report that built a strong case for the growing market potential for safer chemistry — as well as the business and economic risks of not adopting them.