Thursday, 25 October 2012 21:35

BASF provides IIVS with In Vitro Equipment Featured

The chemical company BASF SE has provided U.S. based Institute for In Vitro Sciences (IIVS) with equipment critical to replacing the use of animals for eye irritation testing of certain chemicals. IIVS will place the units at each of its newly developed training laboratories in Xi'an, Beijing, and Guangzhou, China.

With a long history in the development and use of non-animal methods, BASF engineered and produced the instrument, known as an opacitometer, to provide a reliable, state-of the art, and commercially available platform for the Bovine Corneal Opacity and Permeability (BCOP) assay. "We determined that development of this equipment was necessary to standardize the BCOP assay for our own internal use. Realizing that it could help scientists around the world implement this important non-animal method, we made it commercially available in 2010 at production cost," says Dr. Susanne Kolle, Head of Applied Alternative Methods at BASF SE. "We are proud to support IIVS' efforts to promote the use of non-animal methods in China by providing three opacitometer kits."

Read more: http://www.iivs.org/