The main objective of the collaboration is to meet with new and stricter EU regulations governing the testing of compounds for a variety of industries, including both the cosmetic and pharmaceutical sectors.
In the agreement BASF has also included a five-year option to develop final product deliveries, which may be incorporated into its Beauty Care division.
Allergy testing without cruelty
“Allergic reactions to compounds are a serious risk in new products that needs to be discovered in the early stages of development,” said Biovator CEO Stan Mikulowski.
“This collaboration has the potential to open new dimensions in early industrial research that involves testing… the future test product can become an important factor when setting new industry standards.”
For the cosmetics sector the collaboration will target the development of In Vitro tests that will comply with the 7th Amendment to the EU Cosmetics Directive, which basically outlawed the testing of animals on cosmetics products back in March of this year.
Key alternatives still not found
The amendment meant that testing cosmetic ingredients on animals becomes illegal for skin irritancy, phototoxicity, corrosivity, percutaneous absorption, genotoxicity, ocular irritancy and acute toxicity.
In turn, this has led to a scramble to find In Vitro testing alternatives for this range of toxicity tests. So far alternatives have been developed for all areas except genotoxicity, ocular irritancy and acute toxicity tests.
Likewise, the scramble for alternative tests has become all the more of an imperative because a ban on the testing of cosmetic ingredients on animals in Europe is due to come into force by the end of 2013.
In answer to this problem, a number of companies involved in the development of testing alternatives have devised means of reproducing skin cells as a means of testing compounds for toxicity.