NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Caliper Life Sciences today said that the US Environmental Protection Agency has exercised an option to extend its contract with the firm through 2009.
According to Caliper, the ToxCast contract with EPA has brought in revenues of around $3.5 million thus far, and it expects to bring in $3 million under the contract this year. The contract initially began in April 2007, and Caliper recognized revenues of $1.2 million from the partnership in 2008.
Under the contract, Hopkinton, Mass.-based Caliper is working with EPA on developing new in vitro approaches to identifying chemicals that are potentially toxic to the environment. In Phase I of the collaboration, Caliper Discovery Alliances and Services established a database of in vitro assay data on a broad set of compounds, which the firm said met the goals for high-quality data and potential predictive power.
EPA presented initial analyses of Phase I data generated through the collaboration this week at the Society of Toxicology annual meeting in Baltimore, Md.
"These results, coupled with the EPA's third year option exercise, reinforce the likelihood for Phase II efforts to begin at Caliper in the third quarter of this year, which supports our expectation of receiving approximately $3 million of service task orders under this contract in 2009," Caliper President and CEO Kevin Hrusovsky said in a statement.