A Look Back at 2019

The PETA Science Consortium International e.V. is wrapping up another fruitful year of activities advancing the field of non-animal toxicity testing. Here’s a quick look at some of our work in 2019:

• We hosted five webinars:
  • The Integrated Chemical Environment (ICE): Tools and Data to Support Toxicity Assessments
  • Replacing Foetal Bovine Serum in Cell Culture Media
  • The following 2019 webinars were part of our ongoing series, “Use of New Approach Methodologies (NAMs) in Risk Assessment”, which are co-organised with the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.
    • • MPPD and CFD Modeling to Predict Dosimetry of Inhaled Substances
      • New Approaches for Respiratory Sensitisation
      • New Approaches for Fish Toxicity Testing

• We published the following three papers and have one accepted and one under review:
  • Hilton G, Odenkirchen E, Panger M, Waleko G, Lowit A, Clippinger AJ. Evaluation of the avian acute oral and sub-acute dietary toxicity test for pesticide registration. Regul Toxicol Pharmacol. 2019;105:30-35. This publication was used by the EPA to draft a policy that will allow companies to submit a waiver for the avian sub-acute dietary test.
  • Costin G-E, Hill E, Brown J, Clippinger AJ. Qualification of a non-animal vaginal irritation method admitted as nonclinical assessment model (NAM) in the Incubator Phase of the United States Food and Drug Administration (US FDA) Medical Devices Development Tool (MDDT). Toxicol In Vitro. 2019;62:104680.
  • Septiadi D, Rodriguez-Lorenzo L, Balog S, Spuch-Calvar M, Spiaggia G, Taladriz-Blanco P, Barosova H, Chortarea S, Clift M, Teeguarden J, Sharma M, Petri-Fink A, Rothen-Rutishauser B. Quantification of carbon nanotube doses in adherent cell culture assays using UV‐VIS‐NIR spectroscopy. Nanomaterials. 2019; 9(12):1765.

• We co-organised the workshop “Developing Strategies to Increase the Use of Recombinant Antibodies” with the National Toxicology Program Interagency Center for the Evaluation of Alternative Toxicological Methods. Building upon a 2018 meeting organised by EURL ECVAM, this meeting set the stage for a larger workshop that we will hold in 2020. Stay tuned for publication of the 2019 workshop proceedings and details on the 2020 workshop.

• We awarded three early-career scientists with interest in non-animal methods travel grants to attend scientific workshops and conferences around the world.

• We donated equipment for assessing respiratory toxicity to an in vitro contract research organisation.

• We won an honourable mention for Best Paper of 2018 from the Society of Toxicology’s Biological Modeling Specialty Section for the co-authored paper “Pathway-Based Predictive Approaches for Non-Animal Assessment of Acute Inhalation Toxicity.”

• We attended and chaired several sessions at scientific conferences, including the 58^th Annual Society of Toxicology meeting and the 22^ndEuropean Congress on Alternatives to Animal Testing, and presented more than two dozen posters and oral presentations.

We are excited for the coming year and look forward to continued productive collaborations to advance effective animal-free toxicological assessments.

We have 19 scientists on our global team and plan to expand 2020. If you are interested in joining our team or know someone who is, check out our job openings here.

8th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Cellular and Computational Toxicology

22nd European Congress on Alternatives to Animal Testing

Meeting with the European Chemicals Agency

IUTOX 15th International Congress of Toxicology

See our highlights from past years:

2018