The cutting-edge approaches developed by Unilever and EPA are intended to result in better ways to evaluate new ingredients and chemicals, and the potential affect they will have on human health. They are said to represent the first steps in chemical safety testing and risk assessment, making them more relevant to humans, cheaper and faster.

Vice President of Unilever’s Safety and Environmental Assurance Centre, Julia Fentem, said, “This research collaboration is strategically very important for Unilever’s long-held ambition to eliminate the need for any animal testing while also continuing to ensure the safety of consumers and our environment. If we had robust scientific tools to accurately and rapidly predict exposures to chemicals at the cellular and molecular levels within the human body, this would be a huge step forward in being able to conduct safety risk assessments without using animal data.”

Unilever is putting $800,000 towards the collaboration, offering considerable scientific expertise to help generate and integrate new exposure data to develop a model approach for high throughput risk assessments that include both hazard and exposure predictions.