Tox21 Tests 10,000 Chemicals without Animals

The U.S. government’s Tox21 program, which uses robotics for large-scale in vitro toxicity screening of chemicals, recently tested 10,000 chemicals and concluded that in vitro test data performed better than animal tests in predicting human toxicity, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature Communications. The authors say that toxicity testing conducted using animal models is expensive and that it is often difficult to extrapolate the test results to human health effect because of species differences.