AFSI Newsletter - October 2022

Regulatory systems for addressing the pre-market safety assessment and commercial approval of GE animals and derived products are less well developed than with counterpart systems for GE crop plants, resulting in significant uncertainties that have adverse impacts on both innovation and trade. The Agriculture & Food Systems Institute (AFSI), Acceligen, and the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA) AfriCenter co-organized a capacity building workshop on July 28-29, 2022 in Nairobi, Kenya to assist in the development of the necessary technical and regulatory frameworks to allow for commercialization and trade of products of animal biotechnology. Invited participants from ten countries and the African Union attended the entire workshop, with roughly twenty additional local attendees joining the meeting’s public portion. During the workshop, an interactive case study about Acceligen’s SLICK cattle familiarized participants with the concepts of problem formulation and risk assessment, after which regulators from Brazil, Argentina, Kenya, and Nigeria presented on their regulatory frameworks. Examples of approved gene edited livestock in Brazil and Argentina were then provided, followed by a robust panel discussion addressing similarities and differences between the country-specific guidelines on gene editing. A short video featuring speakers from the workshop may be viewed on the event page. 

Our most recent training event related to animal biotechnology took place during the Fourth International Workshop on Regulatory Approaches for Agricultural Applications of Animal Biotechnologies, which was held in São Paulo, Brazil on September 12-16, 2022. The event was hosted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture, ISAAA, University of São Paulo, and AFSI. Dr. Andrew Roberts, AFSI's CEO, led a hands-on exercise on problem formulation during the final day. In anticipation of this workshop, the following e-learning modules on animal biotechnology were translated into French, Portuguese, and Spanish, making these training resources more accessible to stakeholders in Africa and South America. 

As with all our online resources, these courses are made available to regulatory agencies, academics, the private sector, and other interested stakeholders upon request, free of charge. Those who already have access to our e-learning portal can find the foreign-language versions of these courses by clicking on the desired language tab under the appropriate course category.