Summary: Every year about 2,000 new chemicals are submitted to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for safety approval. Figuring out how a chemical might affect human health involves lab studies that can cost millions of dollars and take years to complete. Now a team of researchers at the EPA is working on a way to make the safety testing process more efficient and less expensive. In this podcast, Robert Kavlock describes the EPA ToxCast™ project, which uses existing toxicity knowledge as a blueprint for broad-scale chemical assessment. Kavlock is director of the EPA National Center for Computational Toxicology and coauthor of "In vitro screening of environmental chemicals for targeted testing prioritization: the ToxCast project"
