The Environmental Protection Agency announced last week the launch of Phase One of ToxCast, a new program designed to dramatically overhaul how the government tests the toxicity of chemicals used in agriculture, manufacturing and other sectors.

The program, which has been under development for about two years, will start by analyzing 340 chemicals that are currently used as or in pesticides. ToxCast will look at how each chemical affects a variety of biological processes and compile the information into a huge database. This data will be combined with information on the chemical's structure and behavior in the human body -- what proteins or receptors it bonds to, for instance -- to help quickly classify chemicals based on their potential for human or environmental harm.

"It's a bit like hurricane forecasting," Bob Kavlock, the director of the EPA's National Center for Computational Toxicology, said of ToxCast. "NOAA gets all this data from a number of sources and they make predictions about strength and direction of a hurricane from that."

Among the first 340 chemicals being tested by ToxCast are some, like atrazine and bisphenol A, that are currently raising alarms as potential threats to people or the environment. The EPA chose these 340 chemicals because, as pesticides, there is a wealth of data already accumulated on each.

"We have a requirement for the data given to us by the manufacturer, so we have a cancer study, a birth defect study, a multi-generation study and a few other toxicity studies that are available to us," Kavlock explained. He estimated that all of those studies combined are probably worth $5 to 10 million per chemical, which adds up to a significant investment in data for each of these chemicals.

The tests that make up ToxCast are substantially cheaper -- and faster -- than standard tests. According to Kavlock, testing each chemical costs about $20,000, and the results arrive in two to three months, whereas a traditional multi-generational animal test costs $600,000 to $800,000 and can take up to a year to get results.

ToxCast may prove to be a major boon to businesses and industries that use potentially harmful chemicals for daily business. "Over in Europe, cosmetics companies won't be able to use animals to test chemicals because of REACH," Kavlock said. "The quicker we can get this done, the better, it can be a big money-saving thing for industry -- if they know what chemicals or what tests they have to focus on, it helps them make a business decision on that."

Kavlock pointed out that Phase One is purely a research program, albeit one on a level never yet tried: by analyzing and compiling data from over 400 tests on these chemicals, the EPA will be able to determine if this kind of screening will work on other chemicals that are less well known. Phase Two of ToxCast will examine as many as 1,000 chemicals used for more diverse purposes that pesticides, to expand the number of chemical signatures in the database and serve as a lead-up to Phase Three, which will examine new and unknown chemicals.

The EPA expects to have results from Phase One by early next year, and will share the data with the public by mid-2008. Kavlock said the EPA is looking for companies to partner with on the program to help identify chemicals and biological processes to study in Phase Two. For more information on ToxCast, visit http://www.epa.gov/ncct/toxcast/.