Botanical Safety Consortium Newsletter December 2020
Botanical Safety Consortium (BSC) Background

The Botanical Safety Consortium (BSC) was officially convened in November 2019 as 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 non-profit Health and Environmental Sciences Institute (HESI). The BSC is a multi-partite, multi-stakeholder, international effort that brings together key scientific experts to enhance the botanical safety toolkit and bring clarity to botanical dietary ingredient assessments. It was formed to provide a sound scientific basis for integrating existing botanical safety and toxicity information with the latest toxicological tools.
The objectives of the BSC are:
- To engage with a broad group of global stakeholders to leverage the best scientific safety approaches;
- To establish the appropriate levels of chemical characterization for complex botanical ingredients;
- To identify pragmatic, fit-for-purpose in vitro and in silico assays to evaluate botanical safety;
- To evaluate the application of these tools via comparison to the currently available safety information;
- And to integrate these tools and approaches into a framework that can facilitate robust evaluation of botanical ingredients.