EPA Awards $4 Million to Develop New Approaches for Evaluating Chemical Toxicokinetics
On August 3, 2020, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced $3,980,782 in funding to five academic research teams to develop New Approach Methods (NAM) for evaluating chemical toxicokinetics. According to EPA, compared to traditional animal testing, NAMs allow researchers better to predict potential hazards for risk assessment purposes without the use of traditional methods that rely on animal testing. EPA is providing a grant of up to $800,000 to each research team through its Science to Achieve Results (STAR) Program. EPA states that the projects will address gaps in ways to obtain data for informing chemical toxicokinetics and exposure-related factors not currently considered. The five recipients include:
- Purdue University to create an integrated blood brain barrier computer model to help determine if a chemical may cause neurotoxicity;
- Texas A&M University to help integrate different types of chemical safety testing for more robust results;
- University of Nevada to develop better estimations of the bioavailability of chemicals to assess the significance of public exposure;
- Vanderbilt University to work on methods to refine organ-on-chip devices for chemical testing; and
- Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to determine how zebrafish metabolism can be better correlated to the human metabolism to improve models for chemical toxicity testing.