Register for Upcoming Webinar on Reducing Animal Testing
Released August 7, 2024
Join the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), PETA Science Consortium International (PSCI), Institute for In Vitro Sciences (IIVS) and California Department of Pesticide Regulation (CDPR) on Wednesday, August 28, 2024, at 11 a.m. EDT for a webinar on the use of new approach methodologies (NAMs), or alternative methods to testing on vertebrate animals for chemical risk assessments.
In August 2023, EPA announced it would host a quarterly webinar series in collaboration with PSCI, IIVS and CDPR on the use of NAMs. This webinar, The CATMoS Model for Acute Oral Toxicity and Evaluation of its Potential Use in a Regulatory Context for Pesticide Hazard and Risk Assessment, is the fifth webinar in that series. This webinar will include two presentations on the Collaborative Acute Toxicity Modeling Suite (CATMoS), a method for predicting acute oral toxicity using the collective strengths of individual computer-based models in place of vertebrate animal testing.
The presenters for this webinar are:
- Kamel Mansouri from the National Toxicology Program’s Interagency Center for the Evaluation of Alternative Toxicological Methods (NICEATM). Dr. Mansouri will present on a global project led by NICEATM and the Interagency Coordinating Committee on the Validation of Alternative Methods (ICCVAM) Acute Toxicity Workgroup. The goal of the project is to develop computer-based models for predicting the acute oral toxicity of chemicals. The project received 139 models from 35 international groups, which were developed using a dataset of 11,992 chemicals. The models were then combined into CATMoS which demonstrated performance comparable to vertebrate animal testing for predicting toxicity. These models cover acute toxicity endpoints relevant to regulations and are now being evaluated for use by EPA to replace vertebrate animal studies in Agency research, regulatory, compliance and enforcement activities for chemicals and pesticides.
- Michael Lowit from EPA’s Office of Pesticide Programs (OPP). Dr. Lowit will present on OPP’s work with multiple national and international organizations and numerous stakeholders to evaluate toxicology studies conducted for pesticides. This work advances the use of NAMs in regulatory risk assessment of acute toxicity. OPP worked with the National Toxicology Program’s (NTP) Interagency Center for the Evaluation of Alternative Toxicological Methods (NICEATM) and Humane Society to evaluate how well computer-based models predict the toxicity of conventional pesticides. CATMoS was used to predict the acute oral toxicity of EPA-registered pesticides and compared to the lethal dose identified via vertebrate animal testing. The results support potentially relying on CATMoS predictions instead of vertebrate animal testing in some cases.
Learn more about EPA’s activities to reduce animal testing both under FIFRA and across the agency.
To register and view more details about the webinar, visit https://www.thepsci.eu/epicwebinars/.