Kim Boekelheide
Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island

The purpose of this event for postdoctoral scholars, graduate students, undergraduate students, and other invited guests is to focus on the importance of animal research to biomedical sciences and toxicology and the ethical obligations of the scientific community to follow the “3Rs” of animal testing (refine, reduce, replace) whenever it is feasible.
 

In the future, toxicity testing will utilize emerging technologies from the ongoing revolution in understanding biological processes to identify the effects of chemicals on toxicity pathways, using in vitro approaches. The interpretation of chemically-induced alterations in toxicity pathways will depend upon sophisticated modeling that extrapolates from the measured dose-response in cell-based systems to human exposure.

 

After providing an overview of the National Academy of Sciences report entitled “Toxicity Testing in the 21st Century: The Vision and Some Questions,” this presentation will turn to a discussion of issues raised by this new approach. The audience will be asked to think about and respond to the following questions:
 

• Is focus on environmental agents important for the design criteria?
• How long will it take to implement this new toxicity testing paradigm?
• Is the focus on “toxicity pathways” useful or distracting?
• Does a test for neurodevelopmental effects have to look at neurons?
• How do we distinguish adaptive versus adverse (toxic) responses?
• Is this a screening tool or a stand-alone system?
• How is the new paradigm validated?
• What about epigenetics and other new biology?
• How do regulators handle the transition in testing?
• How does the apical definition of adversity work in the new toxicity testing paradigm?