The Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing is an academic center affiliated with the Division of Toxicological Sciences in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences of the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health.

 

Johns Hopkins School of Public Health

Commemorative Booklet for CAAT 20th Anniversary Symposium

Abstracts of CAAT-Supported Research

CAAT's 20th anniversary also marks 20 years of our research grants program -- 20 years of providing often-critical seed money to researchers working to develop new in vitro methods, new ways to replace, reduce, and refine the use of animals in the risk assessment process. In the pages that follow, you will find a series of abstracts that describe 15 of the exciting and innovative projects CAAT has helped support

A number of our current grantees have focused on eye irritation and injury -- a key concern in product safety testing. For example, one porject uses croneas taken from cows in an effort to predict not only how severely chemicals may irritate the eye, but also whether (and when) healing can occur. Another has developed a 3-dimensional corneal equivalent system using human corneas.

Other current CAAT-funded projects include efforts to develop: a biosensor-based method to screen for certain toxins in seafood; an in vitro cell model of the human blood-brain barrier that could serve to reduce or even replace the use of large numbers of animals in drug screening, as well as to accelerate the drug discovery and development process; and an in vitro model system for identifying neurotoxins that may cause cognitive and behavioral problems in infants exposed to certain environmental chemicals.

Several of our past grantees graciously submitted abstracts as well. Examples of their work include: a mathematical model for the prediction of the skin sensitization potential of chemicals; a model to predict the allergic potential of new chemcials based on the heat of reaction of the chemicals; and precision methods for cutting very reproducible, very thin tissue slices, offering an in vitro system that retains many of the unique characterisitics of tissue and is applicable to many tissues and species, including human tissues.