A New Decision Tree for Acute Oral Toxicity
A new paper co-authored by XCellR8’s Dr. Tom Ward has set out a practical Decision Tree designed to help safety assessors determine when animal testing for acute oral toxicity is genuinely necessary. We were delighted to see its acceptance for publication in...
How Do You Know? A Short History of GLP
In the 1970s, one of the largest toxicology laboratories in the United States was found to have been fabricating safety data on an industrial scale. Industrial Bio-Test Laboratories ran studies underpinning regulatory approvals for pesticides, industrial chemicals and...
Collagen Boosting – The Claim Everyone Wants and How to Substantiate It
Collagen has become a central idea in anti-ageing skincare, and the framing around it has shifted. The industry now talks about “collagen banking”: acting before collagen decline becomes visible rather than correcting it afterwards. In practice that means...
How XCellR8 made the KeratinoSens™ assay (OECD TG 442D) animal-product-free
XCellR8’s animal-product-free adaptation of the KeratinoSens™ skin sensitisation assay was incorporated into OECD Test Guideline 442D following its development and validation. The original KeratinoSens™ protocol, like many cell-based methods performed in other testing...
OECD TG 492B: The Eye Test That Finally Answered the Whole Question
This is the third article in our run through our regulatory safety testing suite, and after skin irritation and skin corrosion, the eye is where the approach behind both ran into difficulty. Skin irritation and skin corrosion both use reconstructed human tissue, MTT...
OECD TG 431: How Skin Corrosion Testing Works
This is the second in our run through the regulatory safety testing suite, and it picks up where the last one left off. If a skin irritation test comes back showing tissue viability below the threshold, you know the substance is hazardous. What you don’t yet...
OECD TG 439: How Skin Irritation Testing Moved Off Animals
We’re doing something a bit different over the next few weeks. We’ve been asked more than once recently to explain what actually sits behind the regulatory tests we run, so we’re working through our safety testing suite one guideline at a time: where...
Antioxidant Testing: Capacity, Mechanism and What Happens in Cells
Not all antioxidants work in the same way, and not every antioxidant claim is supported by the same level of evidence. A single test result can suggest strong antioxidant activity while revealing very little about how an ingredient works, whether it performs in a...