Product News: Thermo Fisher Scientific Introduces Automated Genotoxicity Assessment

Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., a world leader in serving science, today introduced the Thermo Scientific ToxInsight Genotoxicity Panel, a revolutionary method for examining mutagenic potential of industrial and consumer chemicals.

In July of 2010, the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) passed test guideline 487 as the only international standard test method for assessing micronucleus formation in response to mutagenic chemicals, a test required by chemical safety legislation. Manual operation of the test requires days to complete for a single chemical.

In response, Thermo Fisher Scientific announced today the launch of a fully enabled Micronucleus Test Platform compliant with the OECD guideline. The technology combines the Thermo Scientific ToxInsight CHPS Platform with reagent cartridges and validated standard operating procedure to reduce the time per test to a small fraction of the conventional manual procedure.

In addition, the ToxInsight CHPS Platform is supplemented with automated procedures for analyzing comet formation in cells in conjunction with numerous commercially available comet preparation products. This adds a mutagenicity research tool cells to the Genotoxicity Panel for use on non-dividing cells.

The ToxInsight CHPS Platform makes multiple measurements on each cell, generating a phenotype rather than a single measurement as compared to traditional biochemical assays (such as cell count, LDH, MTT etc.). In addition to automated Genotoxicity Assessment, this automated, bench-top platform is easy-to-use and provides physiologically relevant toxicity assays in vitro, reducing the reliance on late-stage histopathology or animal studies. The ToxInsight CHPS Platform not only profiles compounds for their toxicity risk, but it also determines the mechanism of action of any toxicity detected enabling researchers to rapidly understand the risk of an endocrine active chemical in minutes.

The Genotoxicity Panel and ToxInsight CHPS Platform will be exclusively demonstrated at booth 1634 at the meeting of the Society of Toxicology 2012 annual meeting, San Francisco, California, March 12-14, 2012.