The National Institutes of Health, along with many other federal agencies have recently launched a new and advanced high speed robot screening system that is capable of testing toxicity levels in 10,000 different chemicals.
This system begins a new segment of a continuous collaboration known as Tox21, which has been working for the protection of human health by upgrading the methods of chemical testing in the US.
This system, which is being kept at the NIH Chemical Genomics Center (NCGC) in Rockville in Md. was acquired as a part of the collaboration. Tox21 was set up in 2008 by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences National Toxicology Program (NTP). In 2010, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) also joined the collaboration. It unites the already accessible agency resources in funding, research and testing tools for developing more methods of efficiently forecasting how chemicals would affect the environment and human health.
The robot system screens the 10,000 chemicals, which include the compounds found in food additives, consumer products and drugs. A complete analysis and prioritization process was conducted from over 200 public databases of drugs and chemicals, which were used in the US and other countries, and 10,000 chemicals were chosen for testing. The results of the testing would give a lot of information, which would be useful for determining if these chemicals have the capacity to upset the human body systems and have adverse health impacts.
According to NHGRI Director, Eric Green, from 2008 onwards the Tox21 has been utilizing robots for screening chemicals. However, the new robotic system would screen a much bigger compound library. Christopher Austin who is the NCGC Director at NHGRI has added that the Tox21 collaboration would totally alter the existing information about toxicology, and what was once tested by a person manually for a period of 12 months could now be tested in a single day. This technology has completed screening over 2,500 chemicals for potential toxicity levels with the help of robots and many other ground-breaking chemical screening methods.
Linda Birnbaum, who is the Director of NTP and NIEHS, has revealed that the new robot system would facilitate the NTP to move further in testing chemicals in a better, speedier and smarter way. Furthermore, they would also be able to rapidly give data about potential hazardous substances with detrimental effects, to the decision makers in the health regulatory divisions, to help them to make vital and informed decisions for protecting public health.
Source: http://ntp.niehs.nih.gov