BASF and Transinsight agree to collaborate in exploring alternatives to animal testing
For over 20 years, BASF has been committed to establishing alternative and supplementary methods. Since 2004, the company has been developing and validating alternatives to animal testing in its own alternatives laboratory with a research budget of 2 million euros per year. Even now alternative methods are employed in 25 percent of all the company’s tests. “We are striving to increase this proportion. Transinsight’s semantic search supports us in this endeavour. With the help of this highly promising technology, we – just like any other potential user – can browse the internet, internal sources, patents and specialized databases much more efficiently than before when searching for information on meaningful approaches to new alternative methods”, explains Dr Robert Landsiedel, Head of the Short Term Toxicology Department at BASF. Transinsight’s semantic search engine also finds related terms and web pages that are relevant for the respective search term and thus provides considerably more accurate and comprehensive search results than conventional full text search engines. “Go3R will make a tremendous contribution to improving the process of searching for information on alternative methods”, states Dr Michael R. Alvers, CEO of Transinsight. “To achieve this, we are transferring the Wikipedia concept – the largest internet encyclopaedia compiled by the community – to semantic networks of terms. Currently, this is the most efficient way to achieve a large knowledge base within a short period of time and thus to significantly reduce the amount of animal testing in the long term”, Alvers continues. The www.Go3R.org platform is already available online. The service is free of charge.
Pays
Germany