Asterand plc, a leading supplier of high quality human tissue and tissue-based services, said that the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has expanded its collaboration and phase II funding commitment with Asterand’s subsidiary BioSeek LLC.

Under the EPA ToxCast screening programme, BioSeek is employing its unique BioMAP Systems human primary cell assay platform to predict the biological activity and potential toxicity of environmental and other chemicals on human health.

The new agreement provides $696,000 in additional funding for BioSeek and adds a further 100 compounds to the more than 1000 environmental compounds, pesticides, failed pharmaceuticals, and nanomaterials already analyzed using BioMAP Systems in this ongoing effort.

“Through our work with EPA, BioMAP is yielding a rich harvest of biological information on a wide variety of environmental and other chemicals and their potential effects on human health,” said Ellen Berg, Ph.D., general manager of BioSeek. “The long-term goal of the ToxCast programme is to establish in vitro assays that can forecast the toxicity of chemical compounds and other materials in humans and animals, and several of our primary human cell assays are contributing to predictive models in this effort.”

“As later phases of the ToxCast program include a variety of pharmaceutical compounds,” Dr Berg continued, “our proprietary BioMAP compound database is gaining a rich dataset for mining with our pharmaceutical partners, to help understand the activities and potential safety of their own compounds in the context of human biology. Such insights can then be applied to better prioritize compounds in development prior to undertaking costly human clinical trials.”

“We commend EPA’s efforts to develop superior techniques for predicting the potential health risks of environmental chemicals through its ToxCast programme,” said Jack Davis, chairman and Interim chief executive officer of Asterand plc. “We look forward to continuing our support of the EPA in this endeavour.”

BioSeek’s proprietary BioMAP technology platform bridges the gap between in vitro and in vivo testing and connects primary human cell-based assay data to clinically relevant results. Compounds tested in BioMAP Assay Systems generate biological activity profiles that are compared to those of thousands of well-characterized agents in our proprietary BioMAP database, using a variety of predictive computational analyses.

The US EPA ToxCast programme is developing approaches to predict chemical toxicity using data from high-throughput and high content in vitro assays. The goal of ToxCast is to develop and verify "toxicity signatures," which are algorithms using in vitro and in silico data to predict in vivo toxicities. Phase I of ToxCast has produced data from >300 chemicals, ~500 in vitro assays and ~100 in vivo endpoints, providing a powerful dataset for evaluating the applicability of various analytic approaches for predicting the potential for an adverse response.