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January 15, 2020

EPA Announces January 22, 2020, Webinar on Reducing Vertebrate Animal Testing

Lynn L. Bergeson Carla N. Hutton

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced on January 15, 2020, that it is partnering with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and Physicians for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) to host public webinars on various topics related to reducing, refining, or replacing vertebrate animal testing.  A webinar will be held on January 22, 2020, covering the use and application of the Collaborative Acute Toxicity Modeling Suite (CATMoS), a free resource for screening organic chemicals for acute oral toxicity.  Drs. Nicole Kleinstreuer and Kamel Mansouri will discuss the development of and demonstrate CATMoS, which was developed during a project in which the National Toxicology Program (NTP) Interagency Center for the Evaluation of Alternative Toxicological Methods (NICEATM) and the EPA National Center for Computational Toxicology (NCCT) collected a large body of rat oral acute toxicity data and made these data available to project participants.  Participants built several models that were then used to generate consensus predictions for the acute oral toxicity endpoints of interest to regulatory agencies.  The webinar will offer a walk-through of how to use the modeling suite to generate acute oral toxicity predictions for chemicals of interest.  EPA notes that it “does not necessarily endorse the views of the speakers.”