CIT joins EUR 10 million R&D project funded by EU and European cosmetic industry

21-Jan-2011 - France

CIT, a European non-clinical CRO, announced it will be joining with other partners in a five-year joint research and development project to address the unmet need for test methods for predicting toxicity of drugs, chemicals and cosmetic ingredients. The project is called ScreenTox (Stem Cells for Relevant, Efficient, Extended & Normalised Toxicology). The partners will receive funding within the Health Programme of the European Commission's 7th RTD Framework Programme.


CIT is one of 14 industrial and academic partners in the project, which is coordinated by Inserm, the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research. The “ScreenTox” project will be funded as part of a research cluster with an overall budget of EUR 50 million. This cluster covers seven projects and represents a unique joint effort from the European Commission and the European Cosmetic Association (COLIPA).

In the development of products for use by humans, it is vital to identify compounds with toxic properties at an early stage of their development, in order to avoid spending time and resources on unsuitable and potentially unsafe candidate products. Human pluripotent stem cells offer an unparalleled opportunity to create a wide variety of human cell-based test systems because these cells may be expanded indefinitely and triggered to differentiate into any cell type. The “ScreenTox” project aims at making use of these two attributes in order to optimize current processes and develop novel methods to achieve functional differentiation of human-based target cells in vitro.

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