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Less animal testing: European grant of 3 million euros for toxicogenomics project

This month, a big leap will be made towards a world free of animal testing when the Toxicogenomics Department of Maastricht University Medical Centre starts the diXa project (Data Infrastructure for alternatives to animal-based Chemical SAfety testing). The project will officially be kicked off on Thursday 20 and Friday 21 October. The European Union made available nearly three million euros from the 7th frame programme. Prof. Jos Kleinjans, project leader and department chair, says: ‘For the third time in a row, the Toxicogenomics Department managed to not only land such a big EU project (www.newgeneris.org and www.carcinogenomics.eu) but also the responsibility of coordinating it from Maastricht.’

Participating parties in the diXa project are – apart from Maastricht UMC+, which will be responsible for the coordination – the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (Germany), Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science (Germany), Genedata (Switzerland), Imperial College London (Great Britain), EU Joint Research Centre (Italy) and the Klinikum der Universität Köln (Germany).

Toxicity
New biological techniques enable a fundamental shift in understanding toxicity and the ways of studying toxic processes. The 'omics' technologies make it possible to map genetic and molecular processes on a large scale. This is how brand new insights into the how and why of toxic effects are developed.

Toxicity is a complex biological phenomenon, in which a lot of factors play a part. The 'omics' technologies within toxicological research make it possible to unravel this complex network of factors and then use this knowledge to develop test methods for determining the safety of chemical substances, based on a thorough understanding of the biological human process.

diXa
On Thursday and Friday, 20 and 21 October, the diXa project, which will develop this concept in ‘daily academic practice’, will officially be kicked off in Maastricht. ‘In this three-year project we will tie together seven databases from European Toxicogenomics (which all use ‘omics’, bioinformatics and computational biology to find alternatives to current testing on animal models to determine toxicity) with databases containing information about human diseases’, explains Kleinjans. ‘This will result in one big database experts can access via a website accessible to the public. This makes it easier to see which possible health-damaging effects result from a chemical substance, including over the long term.’

This should result in a future reduction in the number of animals tested in medical research, industrial chemicals and the cosmetics industry. Within the European cosmetics industry in Europe it is already illegal to use test animals to assess the safety of new substances in cosmetic products.

See: http://toxicogenomics-um.nl