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Accelerating the Development and Use of Alternative Methods for Application to Chemical Risk Assessment
Citation:
Thomas, R. Accelerating the Development and Use of Alternative Methods for Application to Chemical Risk Assessment. Presented at Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC) Asia Pacific conference, Daegu, N/A, SOUTH KOREA, September 16 - 19, 2018.
Impact/Purpose:
The US Environmental Protection Agency has been developing and refining new approaches that allows for rapid and efficient testing of chemicals for potential safety concerns while using fewer use of animals and providing a more robust scientific basis for assessing health effects. The path for incorporating these new approaches into quantitative chemical risk assessment poses a diverse set of scientific challenges. The presentation will cover progress in systematically addressing each of these challenges, case studies on delivering the complex data from the new approaches in a useful way to risk assessors, and provide a glimpse of what chemical risk assessments could look like in the 21st century.
Description:
Tens of thousands of chemicals are currently in commerce, and hundreds more are introduced every year. Because current chemical testing is resource intensive, only a small fraction of chemicals have been fully evaluated for potential human health effects. To address this challenge, the US Environmental Protection Agency has been developing and refining new approaches that allows for rapid and efficient testing of chemicals for potential safety concerns while using fewer use of animals and providing a more robust scientific basis for assessing health effects. The path for incorporating these new approaches into quantitative chemical risk assessment poses a diverse set of scientific challenges. These challenges include sufficient coverage of toxicological mechanisms to meaningfully interpret negative test results, development of increasingly relevant test systems, computational modeling to integrate experimental data, putting results in a dose and exposure context, characterizing uncertainty, and efficient validation of the test systems and computational models. The presentation will cover progress in systematically addressing each of these challenges, case studies on delivering the complex data from the new approaches in a useful way to risk assessors, and provide a glimpse of what chemical risk assessments could look like in the 21st century. The view and opinions are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect policy of the Environmental Protection Agency