Botanical Safety Consortium Annual Meeting 2020

BSC 2020 Virtual Annual Meeting
May 2020

BACKGROUND

The Botanical Safety Consortium (BSC) was officially convened in November 2019, with a mission to enhance the botanical safety toolkit and bring clarity to botanical dietary ingredient assessments for manufacturers and regulators. The BSC is the result of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the National Institute of Health’s National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), and the Health and Environmental Sciences Institute (HESI).

The BSC provides a forum for global scientists from government, academia, consumer health groups, industry, and non-profit organizations to work collaboratively to generate a sound scientific basis for integrating existing safety data and the latest toxicology tools to evaluate safety in botanical dietary supplements.

The BSC will fulfill its mission via the following objectives:

  • Engage with a broad group of global stakeholders to leverage the best scientific approaches
  • Establish the appropriate levels of chemical characterization for complex botanical products
  • Identify pragmatic, fit-for-purpose, in vitro & in silico assays to evaluate botanical safety
  • Evaluate the application of these tools via comparison to the currently available safety information
  • Integrate these tools and approaches into a framework that can facilitate robust evaluation of botanical substances

MEETING OBJECTIVES

  • Provide information on the structure, mission, objectives, and strategy of the BSC
  • Share an overview of the current Technical Working Group (TWG) plans
  • Recruit new BSC members
  • Solicit input into current scientific challenges and opportunities related to botanical dietary supplement safety

ATTENDEES

  • Unlimited space for webinar connections
  • Interested parties / stakeholders who are interested in joining the BSC as part of the Stakeholder Council or TWG members
  • Stressed that the BSC is a scientific endeavor; ideally, we will have key scientific leadership interested in this meeting

9:00 Botanical Safety Consortium First Annual Meeting - Michelle Embry, HESI

9:15 Botanical Safety: Discovering Common Struggles, Needs, and Solutions - Dan Marsman, Procter & Gamble

9:35 The BSC as a public-private partnership: HESI‘s involvement in the BSC - Connie Mitchell & Michelle Embry, HESI

10:05 Research on Botanical Safety at the National Toxicology Program - Cynthia Rider, NIEHS / NTP

10:25 The Modernization of FDA’s Dietary Supplement Program: the Botanical Safety Consortium - Cara Welch, USFDA CFSAN

10:45 What are the objectives of the BSC and how does it plan to meet them? - Jim Griffiths, CRN

11:00 Botanical Ingredient Characterization; a tale of more than one thousand and one compounds - Stefan Gafner, ABC

11:30 Avengers Assemble! A Day in the Life of the BSC Technical Working Groups - Joe Dever, Amway

12:00 Conclusions

12:15 Open discussion / Q&A

12:45 Adjour