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Development of the Alternatives Assessment Dashboard
Citation:
Martin, T. AND L. Vegosen. Development of the Alternatives Assessment Dashboard. ICOSSE, Cincinnati, Ohio, August 12 - 15, 2018.
Impact/Purpose:
The pressing environmental and health challenge in chemical safety practices is the lack of information on many chemicals. The goal of this project is to develop a tool to compare chemical alternatives utilizing an array of sources including quantitative toxicity data, QSAR (Quantitative Structure Activity Relationship) predictions , GHS (Global harmonization System) scores, and chemical lists. In the Alternatives Assessment Dashboard, chemicals are compared in terms of hazard profiles which list scores (low, medium, high, and very high) for an array of categories including acute mammalian toxicity, carcinogenicity, acute aquatic toxicity, and persistence. The long term importance of the project is the development of web tools that provide users a quick snapshot of a chemical’s hazard potential on EPA’s Chemistry Dashboard. In addition it will raise awareness of EPA’s new QSAR models for predicting toxicity. Potential users of these tools include the program offices and industry.
Description:
The goal of alternatives assessment is to identify safer alternatives for chemicals of concern. Comparing chemical hazard profiles (i.e., values for key toxicity categories) is an important component of alternatives assessment. Curating data for a large number of chemicals poses challenges. Several organizations, most notably GreenScreen service providers, perform chemical alternatives assessments and provide user-friendly information for chemical comparison. However, most of these services are not free and are independent of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Therefore, we are developing a user-friendly alternatives assessment tool that merges chemical hazard data from a variety of sources to enable quick comparison of chemicals across several hazard domains. We obtained chemical hazard data from public online sources and used java programming to parse these data. Chemical hazard data can be in the form of Globally Harmonized System (GHS) scores, the presence of a chemical on one or more lists, quantitative data from one or more toxicity studies, and predicted values based on quantitative structure activity relationships (QSAR). The Toxicity Estimation Software Tool (T.E.S.T.) can provide QSAR estimates for several toxicity endpoints. Data from multiple sources is used to determine a score (low, medium, high, or very high) for each of several hazard domains (such as acute toxicity, carcinogenicity, etc.). We considered several methods for combining information into one score. The tool enables the scores for different chemicals to be viewed in a succinct color-coded table, providing the capability to quickly compare chemical alternatives. The Alternatives Assessment Dashboard will be implemented in the EPA’s Chemistry Dashboard (https://comptox.epa.gov/dashboard).