Developmental neurotoxicity testing with human embryonic stem cell-derived in vitro systems: the novel FP7 ESNATS tests are available

Use of alternative assays to identify and prioritize organophosphorus flame retardants for potential developmental and neurotoxicity

“…Some other parallel screening efforts covering other end-points for reproductive, developmental and neurotoxicity are currently underway by consortiums such as ReproTect, ESNATS, Chemscreen and ToxCast (Bolt et al, 2013;Krug et al, 2013;Silva et al, 2015).…”

“…This is a well-established assay and has been used as a representative DNT screen by several other groups such as the European Union research consortium (ESNATS) (Bolt et al, 2013;Krug et al, 2013).…”

Monocrotophos in Gandaman village: India school lunch deaths and need for improved toxicity testing

“…While there is no deus ex machina to solve all these challenges for the experimental toxicologist, the advent of pluripotent stem cells (PSCs) provides significant improvements (Baquié et al 2012;Leist et al 2008), enabling the impact of potentially toxic pesticides to be studied on virtually all types of cells without recourse to immortalized cell lines. Within the last 5 years, the European ESNATS consortium has been developing pluripotent stem cell-based toxicity tests, and first results demonstrate that such test systems may indeed become powerful tools (Krug et al 2013;Bolt 2013;Vojnits et al 2012;Kern et al 2013;Meganathan et al 2012;Kuegler et al 2010;Zimmer et al 2011a, b;Balmer et al 2012). The consortium has shown that complex functional endpoints can be transferred to in vitro test systems Kadereit et al 2012;Zimmer et al 2012).…”

Animal use for science in Europe

“…Similar concepts have been embraced by other major US regulatory/research authorities that then formed the Tox21 consortium (http://tox21.org (Knudsen et al, 2013)) to join forces along these new technologies. The NRC report also sparked large European research initiatives, such as the SEURAT-1 consortium (Gocht et al, 2015) or the ESNATS (Zimmer et al, 2014;Kuegler et al, 2010;Bolt, 2013;Krug et al, 2013) and ChemScreen projects (Krug et al, 2013;Bolt, 2013;Rovida et al, 2014;Piersma, 2015;van der Burg et al, 2015;Wedebye et al, 2015). In the years to follow, also other areas, such as countermeasures to chemical and biological warfare (Hartung and Zurlo, 2012) have chosen similar new strategies to suggest animal-free research strategies.…”