Caliper Life Sciences, Inc. (Nasdaq: CALP), a leading provider of tools and services for drug discovery and life sciences research, today announced that its Caliper Discovery Alliances and Services (CDAS) unit has been awarded a new funding commitment for $1.8 million under its contract with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for the EPA's ToxCast screening program. This new task order increases the cumulative funding Caliper has been awarded under the ToxCast program to $5.6 million.
"We are pleased to receive this new order from the EPA, which we believe further validates Caliper's capabilities and performance in the area of predictive toxicology screening assays. This new task order confirms Caliper's future role in the EPA's ToxCast program, and supports our belief that our funded activities will continue to expand as work starts on the new set of compounds in the coming year. We believe this task order will help fuel strong double-digit growth by our CDAS business in 2010 to complement our continuing strong imaging and microfluidic growth outlook," commented Kevin Hrusovsky, President and CEO of Caliper.
Caliper has been working with EPA on its ToxCast program since 2007. The initial goal of the ToxCast program is to create a database of in vitro (laboratory) assay data on a broad set of compounds for which in vivo (animal) safety data already exists. The long term goal of ToxCast is to identify in vitro assays that can predict toxicity in humans and animals and then employ those predictive tests to supplement or replace existing animal-based tests, thus reducing the cost and improving the speed of regulatory approval of new environmental chemicals.