Safety Assessment of Food and Feed from GM Crops in Europe: Evaluating EFSA's Alternative Framework for the Rat 90-day Feeding Study

Regulatory-compliant rodent subchronic feeding studies are compulsory regardless of a hypothesis to test, according to recent EU legislation for the safety assessment of whole food/feed produced from genetically modified (GM) crops containing a single genetic transformation event (European Union Commission Implementing Regulation No. 503/2013). The Implementing Regulation refers to guidelines set forth by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) for the design, conduct, and analysis of rodent subchronic feeding studies. The set of EFSA recommendations was rigorously applied to a 90-day feeding study in Sprague Dawley rats. After study completion, the appropriateness and applicability of these recommendations were assessed using a battery of statistical analysis approaches including both retrospective and prospective statistical power analyses as well as variance covariance decomposition. In the interest of animal welfare considerations, alternative experimental designs were investigated and evaluated in the context of informing the health risk assessment of food/feed from GM crops.