Welcome to NOTOX

NOTOX is one of the building block projects of the European research initiative SEURAT (safety evaluation ultimately replacing animal testing) funded by EU-FP7 HEALTH programme and the European Cosmetics Association (Cosmetics Europe). The total funding for the cluster projects is 50 million €. This initiative with six projects as building blocks aims at the common strategy “towards the replacement of current repeated dose systemic toxicity testing in human safety assessment”.

The European legislation requires proof of safety of consumer products on the European markets.  A major group of consumer products is cosmetics and is regulated by the European cosmetic legislation that will impose a complete ban on animal testing in Europe for cosmetic products and individual cosmetic ingredients after March 11, 2013. For the safety and risk assessment, alternative methods to animal testing based on the principles of reduce, refine and replace animal tests are highly emphasized.

The replacement of in vivo testing for systemic, repeated dose and long term toxicity in humans still represents a major challenge. The existing long term test methods involving animals can only be replaced by incorporating various strategies in an integrated multifaceted platform using a systems biology approach. This will also require in silico methods and powerful bioinformatic tools to process huge amounts of data that is usually collected in a typical systems biological setup. This systems approach is highly promising for a more comprehensive understanding and better prediction of repeated dose toxicity of test compounds.

Using today’s state-of-the-art in alternative methods as starting point, the NOTOX project will explore and establish beyond the state-of-the-art techniques based on systems biology approach using “-omics” to establish causal predictive models for long term toxicity using human relevant test systems.

NOTOX has assembled top academic experts and SMEs from France, Sweden, The Netherlands, Israel, Great Britain and Germany. The project is coordinated by Prof. Elmar Heinzle at the Biochemical Engineering Institute of the Saarland University together with Dr. Fozia Noor and EURICE.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement No 267038 and Cosmetics Europe.