Public Funding for Michabo Health Science Ltd

Laws require chemicals to be safety tested to authorise their manufacture or importing (e.g., UK- and EU-REACH). Most current regulations rely heavily on animal testing. Increasing societal pressures are leading to changes in laws to ban or reduce animals in safety testing (i.e. EU Cosmetics Regulation (2013) banning animal testing; on-going amendments to EU-REACH), leaving the chemical industry with insufficient reliable methods. Furthermore, animal tests are slow, expensive and provide limited insights into toxicity, e.g. death after short-term exposure is still the most widely used toxicity indicator of chemical impact on fish. We propose working towards developing new services for the UK and European chemicals industry for the environmental risk assessment of chemicals that avoid animal testing and are higher throughput and lower cost than existing methods. Within regulatory toxicology, such innovations have become known as New Approach Methodologies (NAMs). Our innovative solution uniquely combines the technologies and expertise of Michabo Health Science (UK), aQuaTox-Solutions (Switzerland) and the University of Birmingham (UK). All three partners are regarded as European leaders in their respective NAM technologies and expert know-how. Our approach combines "omics" technologies that measure thousands of molecular responses to chemical exposure, with computational methods to analyse the data and derive information on chemical hazards. Specifically, transcriptomics measures the response to chemicals at the gene level, and metabolomics uses mass spectrometry to measure more downstream biochemical responses. These complementary technologies will be applied to the rainbow trout fish gill cell line, which is at the core of the first international OECD Test Guideline (OECD TG249) using fish cells instead of live fish for environmental hazard and risk assessment. Studies will be undertaken to optimise the technology integration, build further knowledge of the biochemistry and toxicological responses of the fish gill cells, as well as to work towards developing two services for the chemical industry: in the shorter-term, a cell-based (i.e. animal-free) service that utilises "omics" data for grouping chemicals based on their mechanisms of toxicity for environmental risk assessment under current legislation. Also developing a cell-based service that utilises "omics" technologies to estimate long-term fish toxicity in support of reducing and replacing corresponding live fish tests.