NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – BioSeek said today that it has expanded an agreement with the Environmental Protection Agency, under which EPA will use the firm's BioMap in the second phase of its ToxCast program.
Under the agreement, EPA will use the BioMap, which employs cell-based disease models to generate activity profiles of potential drugs, to study the biological effects of certain chemicals and help the agency select new candidates. BioSeek also will use its technology to assess the impact of these chemicals on the environment and on human health.
The South San Francisco-based company could earn as much as $1.74 million over the next year of the program, and it will remain eligible to participate in further phases of the ToxCast program.
In the first and proof-of-concept phase of the collaboration, which began in 2007, EPA and other investigators began comparing toxicity profiling data using the BioMap along with other profiling technologies.
The five-year ToxCast program is structured into three phases, and it is managed by the EPA's National Center for Computational Toxicology. The third and final phase of the project will expand the list of compounds to include thousands of environmental chemicals.