Newswise — In the latest installment of The Researcher’s Perspective podcast series, Dr. Robert Kavlock, director of the U.S. EPA National Center for Computational Toxicology, talks about the agency’s ToxCast™ project. The Researcher’s Perspective is the monthly podcast series of the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Health Perspectives (EHP). The new podcast is available at http://ehponline.org/static/podcasts.action.
Many chemicals already on the market have not undergone the testing needed to judge their safety when it comes to human exposure. ToxCast is intended to streamline chemical testing by prioritizing which compounds warrant safety testing using traditional time-, labor-, cost-, and animal-intensive assays. ToxCast does this by comparing untested chemicals against data for well-characterized compounds to predict how those new chemicals may act in the human body—and which have the greatest potential to cause adverse health effects.
“Hopefully in the future this is going to lead to a much more intelligent way that we test chemicals for effects in animals, and use that information to assess whether they’re going to be harmful to humans or not,” Kavlock said in the podcast. Kavlock is a coauthor of an article in the March 2010 issue of EHP describing the first phase of ToxCast.
“Our goal at EHP is to inform the public of scientific discovery in the field of environmental health, and what benefit it has for them,” said EHP Editor-in-Chief Hugh Tilson. “Through The Researcher’s Perspective, EHP has found another way to make this information accessible and meaningful. Dr. Kavlock’s explanation of a complex scientific project offers not just the findings of his work, but also the context and meaning behind it.”
The Researcher’s Perspective was created in 2009 by EHP to spotlight key environmental health issues and give researchers an opportunity to discuss the impact of their work on human health.
Published since 1972 by the U.S. National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, EHP’s mission is to serve as a forum for the discussion of the interrelationships between the environment and human health by publishing the best peer-reviewed research and balanced, credible news of the field.
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