April saw the launch of the inaugural issue of a brand-new scientific journal entitled NAM Journal, exclusively focused on advancing a shifting paradigm away from animal experimentation to non-animal new approach methodologies (NAMs) and further enabling the principles of 21st century toxicity testing and next generation risk assessment (NGRA) (National Academies of Science – Landmark Paper: Toxicology in the 21st Century).
CA Canada is pleased that one of the papers to be featured in this inaugural issue is “Highlighting best practices to advance next generation risk assessment of cosmetic ingredients”, representing one of the most recent collaborative publications developed jointly between international regulators and industry, including Health Canada and CA Canada, through the International Cooperation on Cosmetic Regulations (ICCR). This unique technical collaboration form, today, collectively represents key cosmetic regulators (and industry counterparts) covering more than 60% of the global cosmetics marketplace.
This publication follows-up on the foundational principles paper (Dent et al., 2018), that was published in the Journal of Computational Toxicology, wherein, a framework for the application of NAMs and NGRAs to support cosmetic safety assessments was outlined; in addition to the outcomes from the corresponding 2019 Technical Workshop (Dent et al., 2021), as published in Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology.
In this recent publication, a team of regulatory and industry safety assessors together looked to ‘test drive’ the principles outlined under these two publications via a series of ‘case examples’ to help demonstrate the potential of, and build confidence in, the use of NAMs to support non-animal safety decision making – helping to demonstrate the ‘realm of the possible’ in encouraging this important paradigm shift, away from the strict dependence on data derived from animal testing. Given the promulgation of Canada’s “Cosmetic Animal Testing Ban” in December 2023, this is a key scientific advance that furthers this important policy direction in Canada.
