unds, says Elias Zerhouni, director of the National Institutes of Health.
All the data produced will be put into a public database. "We think it is very important for the entire public worldwide to have access to these very precious experimental results," says Kavlock.
It's the fruit of work begun in 2005 by EPA and the National Toxicological Program to speed up toxicological testing. That resulted in a report by the National Research Council last year laying out how it might be done.
To convert from animal to lab testing, the federal agencies will start with compounds previously tested on animals to confirm that the cell-based tests are accurate, says Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute.
This won't mean that animal testing will disappear overnight, but it signals the beginning of the end, says Zerhouni.
Rodents and primates around the world can breathe a little easier.
Ditto animal rights activists who have long opposed testing drugs and conducting other experiments on animals. Top officials from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Thursday announced a five-year deal promising to share technology, information and other resources that will improve the toxicity testing of chemical compounds used in food, medicine and other products using robots rather than lab animals.
This joint effort will include experts from the NIH National Toxicology Program (NTP), high-speed, automated screening robots at the NIH Chemical Genomics Center and computational toxicology capabilities available at the EPA Office of Research and Development's National Center for Computational Toxicology (NCCT).
"Today we want to report to you this remarkable collaboration," Elias Zerhouni, director of the NIH, said during a teleconference with reporters held to announce the groundbreaking agreement. He added that the effort--designed to expand the use of in vitro testing of human cells and cellular components to identify chemicals with toxic effects--represents the "birth of a new approach to a crucial problem in public health."
The agencies are hoping to coordinate their resources to better identify toxicity pathways, select chemicals for testing, analyze and interpret data, and promote their findings to scientific and regulatory communities. This is expected to generate data more relevant to humans, expand the number of chemicals tested and reduce the time, money and number of animals involved in current lab studies.
The collective budget is yet to be determined, the agencies say. Animal testing has always been a sore point for scientists and animal-rights advocates, following some high-profile cases of mistreatment of lab animals, such as monkeys discovered in 1981 at the Institute for Behavioral Research in Silver Spring, Md., in deplorable conditions. One of the primary ways to test the toxicology of a compound has been to inject it into a lab animal, see if the animal gets sick, and then conduct an autopsy to observe the damage done to their internal organs. (For more on this, click here. Additional information on animal rights legislation can be found here.)