BSC Newsletter - June 2022
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;
- To identify pragmatic, fit-for-purpose new approach methodologies 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 botanicals.
Due to continued uncertainties with COVID-19, feedback from our stakeholders and the goals of the meeting, we have decided to make this year’s Botanical Safety Consortium’s Annual Meeting FULLY Virtual. The meeting will take place on 27 September. The full agenda will be shared in the coming weeks, but our goals will be to communicate updates from the BSC, present talks on chemical analyses and plans for assays to be run in as part of our remit, and listen to talks from leading experts related to botanicals and botanical safety. The meeting is free and open to all. Please register here. We plan to have targeted in-person meetings in 2023 in conjunction with other planned meetings (like SOT or ICSB).
Zoom link to register: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0kfu2pqT0qHtwOFB9SZpNiQRR9dKBoZEGo
We are looking to fill two seats on the BSC Steering Committee. We are currently looking for experts from industry, government, and/or academia to add to the expertise and overall vision of the consortium. The position would be from Q3 2022 to the end of Q2 2024 and would require between 6-8 hours per month of time commitment. We welcome people interested whose organization has been involved for at least six months to apply using this form. The steering committee may not have more than one seat filled by the same organization – please see the list here. If you are interested, please fill out the form by Friday 5 August 2022. Applicants will be screened by the current Steering Committee and then voted on by the Stakeholder Council via electronic ballot.
Save the date for the following BSC events in 2022
- International Congress and Annual Meeting of the Society for Medicinal Plant and Natural Product Research – “Development of a Toolkit to Evaluate Botanical Safety" – Workshop on 28 August. Please see full speaker list here
- International Conference on Environmental Mutagens in Ottawa, Canada 27 August to 1 September 2022 – “A Strategy for Developing a Framework of Genotoxicity Assays for Safety Assessment of Botanicals” – oral platform by Dr. Stefan Pfuhler, Procter and Gamble.
- International Congress of Toxicology in Maastricht, the Netherlands 18 September to 21 September “New Approach Methodologies to Evaluate Botanical Safety” – poster by Dr. Michelle Embry, HESI
- Session proposals submitted for the 2023 Society of Toxicology Meeting and the 12th World Congress on Alternatives and Animal Use in the Life Sciences