On September 5, 2013 the SEURAT1 initiative hosted its First SEURAT1 Stakeholder Event in Brussels sharing latest success stories in non-animal methods for human safety assessment of chemicals with delegates from industry, policy makers, animal welfare groups and regulators. Elmar Heinzle, coordinator of the NOTOX project, contributed to the event by presenting latest research findings of the NOTOX consortium. Jens Niklas (Insilico Biotechnology AG) and Paul van Liedekerke (INRIA) presented specific aspects of NOTOX in a poster session. 

The official take-home messages of the fruitful event as presented on the SEURAT1 webpage are:

• the strong interest of industry in this research work and its willingness to continue its investment in research and innovation enabling ultimately to deploy new safety assessment solutions in various industry sectors (pharmaceutics, cosmetics, food, etc.)
• the need to inform and involve the regulators on a much larger scale to make them aware of the changes on the horizon in the field of alternative animal-free human safety assessment methods
• the willingness of other private and public research initiatives in this field to cooperate and exchange knowledge, avoiding the duplication of effort and supporting faster progress
• the impact of the revolutionary concepts promoted by SEURAT-1 (and others), not only on safety assessment, but also for protection of human health in general, by prevention of e.g. diseases triggered by environmental factors
• the need for a global research strategy allowing to identify the next steps of the required long term research and innovation effort

Please find further information on the SEUART1 Stakeholder event at:
http://www.seurat-1.eu/pages/posts/seurat-1-stakeholder-event-held-on-5-september-2013-in-brussels-97.php

Posters:

• Jens Niklas: In silico solutions for predictive toxicity - multi-scale modeling and in vitro in vivo extrapolation
• Paul van Liedekerke: Modeling spheroid formation for later organotypic toxicity prediction