Evaluations of studies for four well-known human developmental toxicants clearly suggest that a margin of exposure of 1/100th the NOAEL for the most sensitive animal species tested provides adequate safety for the human conceptus. The lowest reported human teratogenic exposures occurred at doses at least one log above the estimated "safe" or acceptable daily exposure based on the most sensitive...

Evaluation of xenobiotic-induced changes in gene expression as a method to identify and classify potential toxicants is being pursued by industry and regulatory agencies worldwide. A workshop was held at the Research Triangle Park campus of the Environmental Protection Agency to discuss the current state-of-the-science of "immunotoxicogenomics" and to explore the potential role of genomics tech...

Heterogeneous oily waste from an old dumping site was composted in three windrows constructed from different proportions of waste, sewage sludge, and bark. The objectives of this pilot study were to examine the usefulness of composting as a treatment method for this particular waste and to study decontamination in the composting process by using a battery of toxicity tests. Five samples from th...

The community conditioning hypothesis describes ecological structures as historical, nonequilibrial, and by definition complex. Indeed, the historical nature of ecological structures is seen as the primary difference between single-species toxicity tests and multispecies test systems. Given the complex properties of ecological structures, multispecies toxicity tests need to be designed accordin...

In many organs of the human body, there are effective physiological barriers which contribute to regulation of the uptake, transport and secretion of endogenous and exogenous materials. ECVAM is involved in the development of several in vitro models for detecting damage to various barriers, for example, the renal epithelium, the intestinal barrier, and the blood-brain barrier, after acute and c...

The potential deleterious effects of extractables/leachables in pharmaceutical products led the USP, EP and JP to require extractable and toxicity testing of container/closure systems. To that, a HS-GC/FID method was developed and validated for the determination of hexane as potential extractable residue from pharmaceutical container closure system into eye drops solutions. A migration study wa...

A series of monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) specific for the alpha-neurotoxin I (Aah I) from the venom of the dangerous Androctonus australis hector scorpion were obtained using carrier protein-coupled toxin. Competitive RIA, receptor assays and mouse toxicity tests were performed to characterise mAbs in terms of affinity and neutralisation. Cross-reactivity studies and two-site ELISA results allo...

Efforts are underway to transform regulatory toxicology and chemical safety assessment from a largely empirical science based on direct observation of apical toxicity outcomes in whole organism toxicity tests to a predictive one in which outcomes and risk are inferred from accumulated mechanistic understanding. The adverse outcome pathway (AOP) framework provides a systematic approach for organ...