Hello, and welcome to the Toxicology in the 21st Century, Scientific Application course. My name is Lena Smirnova, and I'm with Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing. The CAAT has many activities, including research and transitional activities such as education, policy, communication, and different other programs. The focus of our research is development of modern human relevant methods for toxicity testing with a focus on neurotoxicology and computational toxicology. Besides my research activities, I am responsible for the education program at our center and teach principles of Toxicology 21st Century and evidence based toxicology in the master and PhD programs. In this course, you will learn something that is extremely to be aware of while working in toxicology. Regardless of your activity, whether you are regulated to perform a risk assessment, an early career or senior scientist, or a professional working in the chemical, drug, or some other industry. If you're in toxicology and have never heard about Toxicology 21st Century or Tox21 or if you think your knowledge of it is not deep enough, this is the course for you. We will familiarize you with the concept of Tox21 and what is behind this concept. What does Toxicology of 21st Century mean? Why is change in the toxicology field so urgently needed? And how we can make those changes. This course will teach you not only future perspectives and what needs to be done, but it will also give you an overview of what has been done already. You will see that a lot of activities and interesting projects that are going on right now. We would like to be able to bring top people from this field to talk about their area of research. We hope this course will help you to adapt your work to the needs of Toxicology of 21st Century and get access to most modern tools and technologies to work with. Now, briefly about the lesson of module one. The first one is introduction to the main goals and themes of this course. Then you will also learn about driver's for change. The lesson will be given by Thomas Hartung and my co-instructor in this course. And I would like to hand over to him to talk about a bit more about his lecture. >> Hello, I'm Thomas Hartung. But first of all, I'd like to compliment you for choosing this course as it is my course. We are going to talk about something which I consider very important for all of our lives which is safety and how we establish the safety of all the things around us. Chemicals, drugs, consumer products. We are spending about $3 billion worldwide per year for doing so. And we mostly use animals tests, which are consuming about 3 million animals. So we're going to talk about first of all, what other drivers have changed. Why didn't just do something different? And the first reason for this is that they're not human-relevant in many cases. They're using animal experiments and it's not only an ethical aspect but we're simply not 70-kilogram rats. But it's also economical reasons. If you don't allow science at the moment to enter as a competition of new ideas with the old ideas, because many of our tests have been designed for more than 50 years ago. There's no other area of science where this is the case. At the same time, this has economic costs, and these costs are hindering also because it takes too long to make such assessments. But please follow me on this little journey, which is representing somehow what I learned in the last 20 years. >> We will also give you a historical perspective and familiarize you with the main document, he National Research Council report on Tox21. This lesson will be delivered by Dr. Yager, former advise team of education at our school and one of the members of the Tox21 committee. So real insider. After you have heard the lessons from Dr. Hartung and Dr .Yager, you will appreciate the importance and the background, why is this initiative took place and how it's developing. I hope that you enjoy the module.
