Citation:

Sewell, F. AND C. LaLone. Reducing reliance on animals through use of in silico approaches for decision-making. World Congress on Alternatives and Animal Use in the Life Sciences, Niagara Falls, N/A, CANADA, August 27 - 31, 2023.

Impact/Purpose:

Fiona Sewell, together with co-chair Carlie LaLone, is proposing a Session for the upcoming WC12 meeting focused on computational approaches that can provide useful information to inform chemical safety assessment. The session intends to showcase collaborative examples of how developers and industry-users have worked together to increase confidence in, and acceptance of, in silico-based approaches for safety assessment.  

Description:

In silico and computational approaches can provide useful information to inform chemical safety assessment.  These methods are being increasingly used across all sectors for internal decision-making and there are moves towards application within a regulatory context. These approaches have the potential to decrease the current reliance on traditional toxicity testing in animals (e.g., through use for screening and/or prioritization) but can also be used to inform and/or improve studies that may still need to be conducted in animals (e.g., to inform dose or species selection). In silico approaches are higher-throughput and less resource-intensive and therefore are associated with reduced animal use. They can also increase testing capacity to improve safety assessments. This session will showcase collaborative examples of how developers and industry-users have worked together to increase confidence in, and acceptance of, in silico-based approaches for safety assessment.    The session will be introduced by Dr Tim Allen, who will demonstrate how in silico approaches based on mechanistic understanding (e.g., AOPs / MIEs) can be used to inform decision-making for safety assessments without using animals.  The second speaker will present a collaborative effort led by the US EPA to enable wider application of AOP-based approaches in decision making through use of the SeqAPASS tool to assess the taxonomic relevance of AOPs in the AOP Wiki.  This tool can be used to improve species extrapolation to reduce the number of species tested for environmental safety assessments. The third presentation will cover the CRACK IT Challenge RESPIRATOX, an example of a how academics and industry end-users have worked together to create a QSAR-based user-friendly tool that reliably predicts human respiratory irritancy of single compounds and mixtures.  The final talk will demonstrate how computer simulations have been used to conduct human in silico drug trials and have demonstrated higher accuracy than animal models to predict clinical pro-arrhythmic cardiotoxicity.  

Record Details: