BASF and Transinsight collaborate on alternatives to animal testing

Collaboration agreed

BASF and TU Dresden, Germany, spin-out Transinsight GmbH, a provider of semantic search technologies for Web 2.0, are to collaborate in the area of semantic analyses to search for alternatives to animal testing.

Together with the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment, the two companies will expand the first specialised semantic search engine for this research area called www.Go3R.org to become a global internet platform. In the future, experts from all over the world will be able to use this platform to bring together their knowledge on alternative and supplementary methods to animal testing.

BASF has long 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 an annual research budget of €2 million. Alternative methods are currently employed in 25 per cent 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 specialised databases much more efficiently than before when searching for information on meaningful approaches to new alternative methods”, said 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”, said Dr Michael R. Alvers, CEO of Transinsight. “To achieve this, we are transferring the Wikipedia concept 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.”

The www.Go3R.org platform is already available online. The service is free of charge.