A five-figure boost has been awarded to North West laboratory XCellR8 as it seeks to completely eradicate animal testing for chemical ingredients used in cosmetics, personal care and household products.
Sci-Tech Daresbury-based XCellR8, which pursues non-animal testing through a variety of human cell-based methods, believes it is currently the only industrial testing lab developing new – or overhauling established – testing methods to cut out all animal elements.
The firm said the £50k European Union-funded grant, provided by EU research and innovation programme Horizon 2020, marks the next stage in developing and evaluating the test method it has created.
The test, which uses lab-cultivated human cells, will identify the level of harm a new product could cause to humans in a preliminary screen, which is an initial stage to gain basic information about likely acute toxicity. Read more