Regulatory authorities appear to have relied on industry's – not their own – analyses to conclude glyphosate not carcinogenic

Prof Christopher Portier has published an analysis of all available (13) animal studies on glyphosate that were of sufficient quality and detail. The open access paper concludes that glyphosate causes a range of tumours and cancers (see abstract below).

Referring to the verdict by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) to the effect that glyphosate is a probable human carcinogen, the paper states, "The analyses conducted for this review clearly support the IARC’s conclusion that there is sufficient evidence to say that glyphosate causes cancer in experimental animals. In contrast, the regulatory authorities reviewing these data appear to have relied on analyses conducted by the registrant and not their own analyses of the data. As such, they uniformly concluded that the subset of tumor increases they identified as showing an association with glyphosate were due to chance. Had regulatory authorities conducted a full reanalysis of all of the available evidence from the 13 animal carcinogenicity studies as was done here, it is difficult to see how they could reach any conclusion other than glyphosate can cause cancers in experimental animals."

Some of the analyses for the paper were developed to provide expert opinions for the US Roundup cancer litigation.
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A comprehensive analysis of the animal carcinogenicity data for glyphosate from chronic exposure rodent carcinogenicity studies
Christopher J. Portier
Environmental Health volume 19, Article number: 18 (2020)
Published: 12 February 2020
https://ehjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12940-020-00574-1 (Open Access)

Abstract

Since the introduction of glyphosate-tolerant genetically-modified plants, the global use of glyphosate has increased dramatically making it the most widely used pesticide on the planet. There is considerable controversy concerning the carcinogenicity of glyphosate with scientists and regulatory authorities involved in the review of glyphosate having markedly different opinions. One key aspect of these opinions is the degree to which glyphosate causes cancer in laboratory animals after lifetime exposure. In this review, twenty-one chronic exposure animal carcinogenicity studies of glyphosate are identified from regulatory documents and reviews; 13 studies are of sufficient quality and detail to be reanalyzed in this review using trend tests, historical control tests and pooled analyses. The analyses identify 37 significant tumor findings in these studies and demonstrate consistency across studies in the same sex/species/strain for many of these tumors. Considering analyses of the individual studies, the consistency of the data across studies, the pooled analyses, the historical control data, non-neoplastic lesions, mechanistic evidence and the associated scientific literature, the tumor increases seen in this review are categorized as to the strength of the evidence that glyphosate causes these cancers. The strongest evidence shows that glyphosate causes hemangiosarcomas, kidney tumors and malignant lymphomas in male CD-1 mice, hemangiomas and malignant lymphomas in female CD-1 mice, hemangiomas in female Swiss albino mice, kidney adenomas, liver adenomas, skin keratoacanthomas and skin basal cell tumors in male Sprague-Dawley rats, adrenal cortical carcinomas in female Sprague-Dawley rats and hepatocellular adenomas and skin keratocanthomas in male Wistar rats.