This goes beyond the regular scope of Regulatory Compliance News by Nexreg Compliance, but we thought our readers would be interested. From EurActiv.com:
The chemicals industry could soon have access to a quicker and cheaper means of testing the toxicity of chemicals as the US Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have joined forces to use advances in computers, genomics and cellular biology to develop a new high-speed in-vitro testing method for this purpose.
The new method would “allow for the testing of thousands to hundreds of thousands of chemicals a day to determine their possible toxic effect,”…
The EU’s chemicals regulation REACH, in force since June 2007, requires producers and importers of chemicals to register all such substances within the European chemicals agency and to prove that they are safe. Based on the safety data, the EU agency will then either authorise or reject the applications for market authorisation. The regulation was strongly objected to by the chemicals industry, which argued that the economic burden of the imposed safety testing was unacceptable.
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