Report of the Workshop on the Application of QSARs and VFARs to the Rapid Risk Assessment Process at NHSRC and NRMRL
Citation:
MOUDGAL, C., D. M. YOUNG, T. NICHOLS, T. M. MARTIN, P. F. HARTEN, R. VENKATAPATHY, G. N. STELMA, S. Siddhanti, AND C. Baier-Anderson. Report of the Workshop on the Application of QSARs and VFARs to the Rapid Risk Assessment Process at NHSRC and NRMRL. July 2008, SAR AND QSAR IN ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH. Taylor & Francis, Inc., Philadelphia, PA, 19(5 & 6):579-587, (2009).
Impact/Purpose:
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) National Homeland Security Research Center (NHSRC) and National Risk Management Research Laboratory (NRMRL) conducted a QSAR/VFAR Workshop on June 20 – 21, 2006 in Cincinnati, OH. Panelists and participants of the workshop had diverse backgrounds both in human health and environmental safety, and were associated with academic institutions, government agencies, and industry. The workshop’s main purpose was to explore the application and continued development of QSAR models in the risk assessment process. This includes the needs specifically related to homeland security, contamination associated with natural disasters, and accidental and intentional releases. Continued evolution of QSAR models will lead to advances in scientific and engineering solutions to enable EPA and others to effectively manage current and future risks. In addition to the QSAR approach, the current state of VFAR science was also discussed to some extent to determine the feasibility of applying VFAR models to estimate the human health effects from exposures to microorganisms and their biological toxins. QSAR methodology has been around for many decades and is used regularly by U.S. government organizations represented on the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) Interagency Testing Committee (ITC) to predict various toxicities and environmental fate and transport parameters (Walker, 2003). In addition, a number of workshops have been conducted on QSARs since 1983 (Walker, 2003). In 2002, a three-day workshop titled “Regulatory Acceptance of (Q)SARs for Human Health and Environmental Endpoints” was organized by the International Council of Chemical Associations (ICCA) and the European Chemical Industry Council to assess the potential for further development and application of predictive models. At the workshop it was agreed that there was great potential for the further development and application of QSAR models for chemical management, priority setting, risk assessment, classification, and labeling (Jaworska et al., 2003). However, despite many continued workshops and applications by some regulatory bodies, progress in QSAR development and application has been a slow and cumbersome process. The workshop organized in June 2006 aimed to drive the application of QSARs to a greater extent within the Agency (EPA) and also discussed ways to incorporate the popular “-omics” (genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics) method to make the QSAR models more robust in their predictive ability. In contrast to the QSAR method, VFAR methodology is still in its infancy. VFAR is a concept that was developed as a way to relate the virulence-associated genetic elements of a microorganism to its potential to cause human disease (Jenkins et al., 2004). VFAR was originally developed by the National Research Council’s Committee on Drinking Water Contaminants (NRC, 2001) with the aim to use microbial genomic databases to identify new pathogens, examine the potential for human exposure and risks from organisms present in the water, determine the occurrence of organisms with known virulence factors in water, and relate these factors to their potential to cause waterborne diseases (Jenkins et al., 2004). However, specialized databases housing the required bioinformatics data do not exist at present, hence the task of developing and applying the VFAR approach is challenging. It was the goal of the workshop to explore the current state of VFAR science and determine the feasibility of applying the method to NHSRC’s risk assessment process and to NRMRL’s mission of advancing scientific and engineering solutions that enable EPA and others to effectively manage current and future environmental risks.
Description:
Report
URLs/Downloads:
Report of the Workshop on the Application of QSARs and VFARs to the Rapid Risk Assessment Process at NHSRC and NRMRL