The European trade association has committed an additional €1.5m specifically to finance research into the mechanisms through which chemical allergens induce Allergic Contact Dermatitis in humans.
Understanding these mechanisms is an important step on the road to ensuring that future ingredients can be assessed for their potential to induce skin sensitization, without the need for animal testing.
Colipa has therefore made the money available for funding research proposals in this area over the next three years.
The body said that fundamental gaps exist in current understanding have made the research area a priority.
Questions that remain unanswered include:
- How do adaptive immune responses to chemical sensitizers differ from those induced to pathogen antigens?
- Which sensitizer-induced innate immune pathways in the skin are predictive of the subsequent adaptive immune response?
- How do the mechanisms that are important to sensitizer-specific lymphocyte responses differ between mouse and man?
Colipa is asking for research applications to be submitted before the 1st December 2008 and have a word limit of 4,000 words and include a short summary of less than 500 words.
Colipa is currently funding other programmes of skin sensitisation research and is a member of a wider project, Sens-it-iv, which aims to develop and optimize in-vitro tests to replace animal testing.
The EU funded project, founded in 2005, has members from both the private and public sector, as well as industrial and societal interest groups.
