Hamburg, Germany, 03 June 2020:
Evotec SE (Frankfurt Stock Exchange: EVT, MDAX/TecDAX, ISIN: DE0005664809) today announced that its wholly owned subsidiary Cyprotex US, LLC has been awarded a new 5 year contract with the US Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”). The project forms part of the EPA’s Computational Toxicology and Exposure Research efforts (“CompTox”) whose goal is to provide solutions-driven research to rapidly evaluate the potential human health and environmental risks due to exposures to environmental chemicals.
The Toxicity Forecaster (“ToxCast”), launched in 2007, forms a major part of EPA’s efforts to encourage the use of new approach methods to evaluate chemicals. This initiative uses in vitro high throughput screening assays to assess the safety of large numbers of chemicals very quickly and efficiently, reducing the requirement for animal-based testing. As of last year, ToxCast had evaluated a total of 3,800 chemicals including industrial chemicals, consumer products and food additives in over 700 high throughput assays. Cyprotex’ US facility in Watertown, MA, successfully supported these projects from 2013 to 2018, providing high throughput in vitro ADME data for high throughput toxicokinetic (“HTTK”) prediction of exposure for these chemicals in vivo.
The current agreement is worth up to $ 13 m over 5 years.
Dr Craig Johnstone, Chief Operating Officer of Evotec, commented: “We are delighted that Cyprotex has once again been selected by the EPA to support this worthwhile project. Improving the prediction of chemical safety and toxicological risk is an important endeavour right across the life sciences sector. We are pleased to contribute to such an initiative which has the potential to improve sustainability and help us to protect human health as well as the environment.”