8 June 2004 - Health and Safety Laboratory Launches a Joint Industry Project
Britain's leading industrial health and safety research facility and agency of the HSE, the Health and Safety Laboratory (HSL), has launched a Joint Industry Project between Government departments and UK regulators. The project will develop the capability to generate physiologically based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) models, the means to simulate the way chemicals act in humans and animals, and can be used to predict chemical toxicity more rapidly.
The approach may substantially reduce the costs of toxicology testing by minimising the time needed to generate computer models for biological systems, and also reduce the number of animals used in experiments. HSL’s software, which is at the "proof-of-concept" stage, allows researchers to accomplish in a few minutes what would normally require days.
Project
leader, HSL’s Dr George Loizou commented:
"This project has the potential to significantly change the way
toxicologists work, by greatly reducing the mathematical burden and allowing
them to focus on biology.
“The ability to integrate biological parameters in a single computer-based
model will also improve the quality of research as it enables researchers to
investigate the importance of each variable, as well as how they interact in
the disease process".
European Biomedical Research Association figures indicate that approximately 3.5 million animals, predominantly rodents, were used for experimental and other scientific purposes in the European Union in 1999.
More information on this project can be found on the HSL's web site here.
