London, Jan 27 (EFE).– A team of U.S. researchers has developed a method for screening thousands of chemicals for toxicity without testing them on animals, an article in the scientific journal Nature Communications said.

A team led by Ruili Huang, of the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, or NCATS, conducted the Tox21 study analyzing the effects of more than 10,000 chemical substances.

In the study, researchers tested chemicals at 15 different concentrations each through 30 different automated, cell-based assays, assessing the ability of the chemicals to interact with either a nuclear receptor pathway or a cellular stress response pathway.

The researchers’ goal was to improve a method for testing environmental chemicals found in drugs, food, food packaging and consumer products, as well as chemicals produced during manufacturing and industrial processes using cell-based assays.

As a result of the study, scientists generated more than 50 million data and compared them with the chemicals’ original structure to develop patterns of toxicity that may predict potential health hazards.

Matching their results with data on toxicity obtained from animal tests, the team concluded that the Tox21 model has the ability to forecast a chemical’s toxicity both in animals and humans. EFE