Dr. Christopher Vulpe, a professor at the School of Veterinary Medicine at University of Florida, is a semifinalist in a toxicology testing competition sponsored by some federal agencies.
The National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and other groups arranged the three-part competition, which will grant up to $1 million to improve the relevance and predictability of information produced from chemical screening technology utilized for toxicology testing. Only a small number of chemicals in use today have sufficient toxicity information to fully assess their potential health risks, and better approaches to evaluate the safety of chemicals are required, according to the EPA.
Known as the Transform Chemical Testing Challenge, the competition called on advanced thinkers to find new ways of enhancing current toxicity testing methods. Definitely, candidates were charged with developing procedures of including metabolic processes into the type of testing now widely used
Vulpe, a fellow of the college’s Center for Human and Environmental Toxicology, joined UF’s faculty in 2015 as part of the university’s excellence initiative. He was selected as a semifinalist in the competition’s first stage, which tried to obtain theoretical solutions that could be experimentally implemented and awarded $10,000 prizes to the winners, along with an encouragement to continue on to the next level.
“Our team from UF, working collaboratively with Michael Fasullo, an associate professor from the State University of New York Polytechnic Institute, is studying the response of immortalized human cells developed in vitro, or in a dish, to chemicals of interest,” Vulpe said.
Immortalized human cells are a group of cells from a multicellular organism which have changed and are able of reproducing indefinitely, hence are able to be developed in vitro for extended periods of time.
Vulpe added that a major problem with most immortalized human cells is reduced or absent metabolic enzymes associated with chemical metabolism and it means that toxicology tests utilizing them may not correctly reflect what could be anticipated in a person.
The proposed procedure makes use of a DNA-editing technology called clustered frequently interspaced short palindromic repeats, to energize one or more genetic codes for the metabolic enzymes that the cultured cells does not produce any more. By so doing, it permits the cultured cells to start metabolizing chemicals as they usually would in the body and so enhancing the accuracy of the toxicity tests.
Vulpe said that more in vitro tests which can be predicted could also decrease the requirement for animals in chemical testing.
He will compete in the next level of the competition to establish a prototype system that demonstrates evidence of concept.
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