Cellumen to Profile Toxins for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

Cellumen, Inc. has announced that it has signed a multi-year contract with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to profile potential toxins.

"We are pleased to be selected to participate in the EPA's ToxCast™ program," said Dr. Kate Johnston, Vice President of Discovery Programs at Cellumen.

"The goals of this program: to better prioritize environmental chemicals while reducing costs and dependency on animal testing, are perfectly aligned with Cellumen's goals in developing cytotoxicity profiling panels. This project provides a strong opportunity to demonstrate our value for both environmental and pharmaceutical applications."

"This program is an ideal complement to a collaborative program underway with Cambridge Healthtech Associates (CHA) in which Cellumen is providing profiling results to eleven pharmaceutical companies to evaluate how cytotoxicity profiling can be best incorporated into the discovery-development pipeline," Johnston added.

The Cellumen cytotoxicity profiling method measures a full dose response for 11 cellular systems biology parameters at three time points, yielding 330 data points for each compound. Advanced informatics tools are then applied to analyze, mine and display the data to identify patterns of activity and provide insights into mechanism of action.