OREANDA-NEWS. October 15, 2015. Cyprotex PLC (AIM:CRX), a specialist ADME-Tox and Bioscience Contract Research Organisation, today announces that it will form part of the EU-ToxRisk consortium; a project funded by the European Commission to work on the integration of new concepts for regulatory chemical safety assessment. A total of 39 partners are involved in the consortium ranging from industry, academia, research institutes, contract research organisations and regulatory bodies.

The EU-ToxRisk project will start in January 2016 and run for 6 years. The project is funded by the European Commission through its Horizon 2020 programme for Research and Innovation and has a total value to all partners of €30 million over 6 years. The award to Cyprotex is anticipated to be worth approximately €1.0 million over the 6 year period. The aim of the project is to develop new cutting-edge human relevant in vitro non-animal methods and in silico computational technologies for the early assessment of potential toxicity in humans. The ultimate goal is to provide the basis of future regulatory chemical safety testing using animal-free approaches for hazard and risk assessment. Cyprotex plays a major role in the delivery of absorption, distribution, metabolism and excretion (ADME) data to the consortium and will also be involved in validation of some of the newly developed toxicity models.

Anthony Baxter PhD, Chief Executive Officer of Cyprotex, comments, 'We are delighted to be part of the EU-ToxRisk consortium. The project is very much in line with the ethos of the Company where we have been developing in vitro and in silico methods for predicting human outcome for over 16 years. Animal testing is notoriously poor at predicting human safety for certain types of toxicity and awareness of the ethical issues associated with animal testing is growing rapidly. Developing more sophisticated human relevant models will help in addressing these issues, as well as improving the speed and efficiently of screening.'