Chemical Grouping for 21st Century Toxicology, Risk Assessment and Decision Making
Citation:
Simmons, J. AND M. Nelms. Chemical Grouping for 21st Century Toxicology, Risk Assessment and Decision Making. Society of Toxicology Annual Meeting, San Antonio, Texas, March 11 - 15, 2018.
Impact/Purpose:
Developing coherent, intelligent chemical groups is a critical first step in many activities such as: priority setting for further evaluation; identification of co-occurring chemicals in the environment, the body, or the exposome; and, creating and prioritizing groups for chemical mixtures toxicology and mixtures risk assessment. Grouping approaches are now beginning to take advantage of the advances in exposure science, high-throughput toxicology, ‘omics’ sciences and computational technologies which have resulted in a wide array of next generation methods and tools.
Description:
‘Grouping’ is a generic term describing placing chemicals in groups based on characteristics or factors that the assembled chemicals have in common to enable consideration of more than one chemical at the same time. Developing chemical groups is necessary for a variety of useful purposes, including something as seemingly simple but as critically important as safe chemical storage. Key uses of grouping in toxicology, risk assessment, and decision making include: identification of co-occurring chemicals in the environment, the body, or the exposome; creating and prioritizing groups for chemical mixtures toxicology and mixtures risk assessment; identifying chemicals that are toxicologically similar (i.e. that share the same adverse outcome pathway or have adverse outcome pathways that start with different molecular initiating events (MIEs) but converge later in the pathway) or are toxicologically independent. Another important use is developing groups that facilitate the filling of data gaps by techniques such as read-across, trend analysis, extrapolation, interpolation, and QSAR; this use of grouping results in reduced experiment effort, saving time, resources and experimental animals. Grouping also benefits green chemistry and enables use of molecular design for reducing unwanted toxicity. Traditionally, groups have been based on exposure alone or toxicity alone. Strategies laid out in in Toxicology Testing in the 21st Century (NRC, 2007), Exposure Science in the 21st Century (NRC, 2012) and corresponding advances in exposure science, high-throughput toxicology, ‘omics’ sciences and computational technologies have resulted in a wide array of next generation methods and tools. The purpose of this session is to highlight how these advances are being translated and used in ‘next generation’ grouping approaches. In this session experts from industry, academia, and government will present state of the art insights into new methods currently being developed and employed that have current or future application to chemical groups.