Government scientists are launching an ambitious collaboration to shift the testing of potentially toxic chemicals away from animals to methods that use high-speed automated robots. The robots would test chemicals on human cells at various concentrations, generating data relevant to humans faster and more cheaply than current methods, researchers from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced in Boston last week during a teleconference at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The project is also described in a paper in the Feb. 15 issue of Science.
In the past 30 years the National Toxicology Program (NTP) of the NIH has tested about 2,500 chemicals in great detail, says NTP Associate Director John R. Bucher. Now, with advances in molecular and computational biology, the same number could easily be done in an afternoon. Human cells of interest, such as liver or skin cells, can be placed in each of 1,536 tiny wells in a single dish, says NIH Chemical Genomics Center Director Christopher Austin. Concentrations that vary more than a thousandfold can be applied to each well, or 1,536 different chemicals could be applied. Scientists can then analyze the cells to see which survive, grow, die, or stop dividing. They may also determine whether a particular cellular biochemical pathway is affected, says Austin.