The FDA announced a new project to study drug safety. The FDA is not officially involved in the effort, but heralded the Predictive Safety Testing Consortium all the same. The consortium combines the efforts of Arizona’s quasi-governmental C-Path Institute and five pharmaceutical companies. They’ll share internally developed laboratory methods to predict the safety of new treatments before they are tested in humans. The FDA will assist the effort in an advisory role. This unprecedented sharing of potential early indicators of clinical safety could streamline the cost and time of preclinical testing. The Consortium was announced at a press conference detailing the release of the Critical Path Opportunities List—76 initial research priorities that could modernize the drug development process. But Congress has long failed to fund the Critical Path Initiative in deference to political contributions from drug companies, which prefer having most of the agency’s brainpower directed toward approving drugs as quickly as possible.