The US National Toxicology Programme has announced the release date of its case-study protocols, scheduled April 9, to test its planned approach for introducing systematic review techniques into its processes for evaluating chemical safety. There is an article about it in this month’s Environmental Health Perspectives. And there is this, from the NTP website (note the download […]
An on-going point of discussion among colleagues is the appropriate composition of expert panels and whether or not experts with clear and obvious conflicts of interest should be permitted to stand on them. While this is important, it is also important to be clear that ensuring a group of people gives you a balanced opinion […]
Last week I was in Edinburgh at a symposium organised by the CAMARADES research network, which was asking why only 1% of stroke drugs which look good in animal trials end up being effective in humans. (We’ll get to why this matters for toxicological research in a bit.) The picture of drug development painted at […]
This will be fun! It is now confirmed that I’ll be speaking about the Policy from Science Project at a workshop at the SETAC Europe Annual meeting, in Glasgow in May. The workshop topic is: Closing the Gap Between Academic Research and Regulatory Risk Assessment of Chemicals. (Sunday 12 May 2013, 13:00-18:00) It promises to […]
The principles of the Cochrane Collaboration should be fertile ground for opening discussion of how we can change our approach to chemical safety assessment, with implications not only for minimizing bias in data generation and review, but even for managing the overall process of ensuring all chemicals have an adequate pedigree of safety before being […]
Yesterday I participated in a very interesting webinar presenting preliminary findings of a forthcoming case study, applying the Navigation Guide methodology to evidence that PFCs may be reproductive toxins. For those not already aware, the Guide is a US EPA- and University of California San Francisco-led project looking at how methods used for evaluating study […]
— Most of what Professor Healy describes in the above presentation will sound pretty familiar to advocates of evidence-based medicine (EBM). And as he says, he’s not really against EBM, he’s against being blind to the limitations of poor trial data. I don’t think there is a single advocate of EBM who would disagree with […]
Director of the French food safety agency ANSES, Marc Mortureux, recently issued a statement worth reading for a number of relatively subtle points which were lost in the conflagration surrounding a paper suggesting that the Roundup pesticide formula plus GMO corn may increase risk of cancer. Although primarily about GMOs, the ANSES statement touches on a number […]
To explain: objective review is dependent on full access to literature (making trade secrets and unpublished “grey” literature a challenge); a transparent process so every element of the review can be evaluated for soundness; and reproducibility, because that is the only test for objectivity we have.