Stemina Biomarker Discovery announced this week it received a five-year contract worth $10,637,000 from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in conjunction with the federal agency’s ToxCast initiative.

According to a release, Stemina will use its registered devTOX toxicology testing procedures to evaluate various drugs and chemicals and determine their potential to cause birth defects if exposed to pregnant women. The registered devTOX program has been the subject of many peer-reviewed scientific journal articles since its debut in 2009, and uses a strategic combination of two advanced technologies–stem cells and metabolomics.

“The EPA’s ToxCast initiative is the preeminent collection of toxicology information on a broad range of chemicals,” CEO Elizabeth Donley said in statement. “As the only provider of an all human system designed to assess the potential for drugs and chemicals to cause birth defects, we are proud to have our devTOX tests included in this program. Our tests will provide valuable information about the impact that various classes of compounds can have on the developing human embryo.”

Started in 2007, the EPA’s ToxCast program serves to evaluate thousands of different chemical compounds and their potentially adverse health effects by exposing isolated amounts of living proteins to the chemicals in question, and closely monitoring the resulting biological activity. These methods can limit the number of tests needed to determine toxicity, while more efficiently screening large numbers of different chemicals.

Stemina, founded in 2007, identifies biomarkers using specialized metabolomic technologies to predict the safety of agricultural, industrial and pharmaceutical chemicals, in addition to consumer products.