Data Driven Solutions to Reducing Animal Use in Ecotoxicity 

Speakers and topic summaries:
Michael Lowit, PhD, US EPA Office of Pesticide Programs (OPP): Exploring Potential Reductions in Fish Testing in a Regulatory Context
As part of US EPA’s commitment to reducing animal testing, OPP is conducting retrospective analyses of existing data to critically evaluate which Agency guideline studies form the basis of regulatory decisions. The results from these analyses can inform if reductions can be made to the number of animals used without reducing the quality of ecological risk assessments. US EPA is currently conducting a retrospective analysis for fish acute toxicity tests, which are used by OPP to assess potential risk to fish species from pesticides. For each pesticide, the Agency typically requires in vivo testing of three different fish species. This presentation will focus on the relative sensitivity among species subjected to in vivo fish acute toxicity studies. The results of this analysis will inform whether there is a basis for reducing the number of species while providing sufficient information to support pesticide registration decisions.
Carlie LaLone, PhD, US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Office of Research and Development: The Sequence Alignment to Predict Across Species Susceptibility (SeqAPASS) tool: Extrapolating Knowledge Computationally
Regulatory decision-making for chemical safety relies upon toxicity data generated from laboratory test species for the protection of wildlife in the environment. Typically, ecological risk assessments integrate safety factors to account for interspecies variability. But what if there is a more informed way to extrapolate knowledge from model species to other species that did not require the use of animals in toxicity testing and instead used existing protein sequence knowledge? There is a tool available that does just that. This presentation will describe US EPA’s SeqAPASS and its applications for cross species extrapolation relative to understanding conservation of biology and predicting chemical susceptibility.
This webinar is the 10th in a series hosted by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, US Environmental Protection Agency, and PETA Science Consortium International on the use of non-animal methods in risk assessment. More information on the PEP webinars can be found here: www.thepsci.eu...