ECVAM’s ongoing activities in the area of acute oral toxicity

The 7th Amendment of the Cosmetics Directive (2003/15/EC) set up timelines for banning animal testing and marketing of cosmetic products and their ingredients tested on animals. For most of the human health effects, including acute toxicity, the deadline for these bans was in March 2009. Moreover, the new Regulation EC 1907/2006 on Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) provided a strong impetus towards the application of alternative approaches to reduce the number of animals used for toxicological testing. Therefore, the European Centre for the Validation of Alternative Methods (ECVAM) is currently putting considerable effort into developing and validating alternative methods in the field of acute toxicity. The main activities in this area include: (1) the Integrated Project ACuteTox, funded by the European Commission’s 6th Framework Programme in 2005 with the aim to develop and pre-validate a testing strategy to fully replace acute oral toxicity testing in vivo; (2) a follow-up validation study to assess the predictive capacity of the validated BALB/3T3 Neutral Red Uptake cytotoxicity assay to discriminate between toxic/hazardous (LD50 < 2000 mg/kg) substances and substances not classified for acute toxicity (LD50 > 2000 mg/kg); (3) an approach to identify compounds with LD50 > 2000 mg/kg using information from 28-days repeated dose toxicity studies.