Industry Pioneers the Contribution of Substance Data to decrease animal testing
04.04.22
Going beyond medicines development, four pharmaceutical companies supported by the European research based pharmaceutical trade association, EFPIA, have joined forces to launch a voluntary non-profit industry data contribution initiative in collaboration with ECHA, the European Chemical Agency.
The aim is to make high-quality, as-yet unpublished, physicochemical, toxicological and ecotoxicological substance data held in the companies' archives available to the public. The publication of this data is intended to extend the variety of publicly available high quality hazard data on chemicals to, among other things, enhance the effectiveness of database-dependent property prediction tools. These data could then be used by academic science or company experts to gradually reduce or to even avoid animal testing of chemical substances, by improving theoretical models of "Structure Activity Relationship" (SAR) and through the opportunities for read-across - which depend on the amount, diversity, and quality of data on which these considerations or calculations are based.
ECHA has agreed to support this initiative and to act as an honest broker and will serve as the neutral platform for dissemination of these data. Read the ECHA press statement here.
Ultimately, a program will be created in which additional companies can join and make their archive data available to the public. At this time, the partners (ECHA, EFPIA and the founding-member companies: Boehringer Ingelheim, F.Hoffmann-La Roche, Johnson & Johnson, and Merck KGaA) are running a test phase to flesh out the best ways to run this data contribution initiative.
For more information you can access the industries Q&A here.