Countries unite to reduce animal use in product toxicity testing worldwide

US, Canada, Japan and European Union sign international agreement

Representatives from four international agencies, including the director of the U.S. National Toxicology Program (NTP), today signed a memorandum of cooperation that could reduce the number of animals required for consumer product safety testing worldwide. The agreement between the United States, Canada, Japan and the European Union will yield globally coordinated scientific recommendations on alternative toxicity testing methods that should speed their adoption in each of these countries, thus reducing the number of animals needed for product safety testing. The memorandum is available at http://iccvam.niehs.nih.gov/docs/about_docs/ICATM-MOC.pdf .

"Signing this international agreement demonstrates our commitment to finding and advancing alternatives to animal testing," said Linda Birnbaum, Ph.D., director of the NTP and National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, part of the National Institutes of Health. "This agreement will help us achieve greater efficiency by avoiding duplication of effort and allowing us to leverage limited resources."

Birnbaum signed as the U.S. representative on behalf of the NTP Interagency Center for the Evaluation of Alternative Toxicological Methods (NICEATM), one of the national validation organizations participating in the agreement. Others who signed include Elke Anklam, Ph.D., for the European Centre for the Validation of Alternative Methods (ECVAM), David Blakey, D.Phil., for the Environmental Health Science and Research Bureau within Health Canada, and Masahiro Nishijima, Ph.D. for the Japanese Centre for the Validation of Alternative Methods (JaCVAM).

The agreement promotes enhanced international cooperation and coordination on the scientific validation of non- and reduced-animal toxicity testing methods. If the toxicity testing methods are shown to be reproducible based on strong scientific information, and able to accurately identify product related health hazards, the tests are more readily accepted by regulatory agencies.

"The memorandum covers three critical areas of test method evaluation: validation studies, independent scientific peer review meetings and reports, and development of test method recommendations for regulatory consideration," said Marilyn Wind, Ph.D., chair of the Interagency Coordinating Committee on the Validation of Alternative Methods and a scientist at the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC).