The National Toxicology Program, part of the US Department of Health and Human Services, announced a new strategic roadmap last month, prepared by the Interagency Coordinating Committee on the Validation of Alternative Methods (ICCVAM). The roadmap was established for the purpose of providing federal agencies and industry stakeholders alternative approaches for the safety and risk assessment of chemicals and medical products that improve human health or offer replacements for animal testing.

The roadmap puts forth three main goals, all of which focus on connecting end-users with New Approach Methodologies (NAM). The first goal addresses the fact that traditional commercialization of technologies happens after the product is already developed; ICCVAM posits that regulatory agencies and regulated industries should work in tandem with technology developers to identify potential testing requirements, as well as help improve communication between end-users and researchers.

Establishing efficient and adaptable practices for the purpose of inciting confidence in NAMs is the second goal of ICCVAM. Through partnerships, ICCVAM encourages industry stakeholders and government agencies to again work together with creators of NAM, remaining engaged in the development process from inception to ultimate use. This includes establishing public-private partnerships in which data and knowledge will be shared, and a collective pool of resources can be centralized and, therefore, easily accessible.

ICCVAM’s third goal is to facilitate successful adoption of NAMs in the US and abroad. This would require federal agencies and stakeholders to collaborate with international partners, creating incentives to bolster widespread usage of NAMs, and creating metrics to establish project goals, to monitor progress and to quantify the success rate of NAM implementation.

Source: National Toxicology Program