Significant investments in research over many years to improve the understanding of how chemicals can cause toxicity have generated new methods to predict and identify hazards of chemicals. While considerable progress has been made, this effort is still halfway to the goal. With this in mind, participants from all over the world met at the ICCA LRI & NITE workshop “Advancing Chemical Risk Evaluations Through Use of New Approach Methods (NAMs): Challenges and Opportunities”, held on June 20-21, 2022, in Yokohama, Japan, to exchange on chemical toxicity.
During the event, recent research activities and initiatives to accelerate the development and use of new approach methods (NAMs) were presented. These are methods that do not rely on the use of animals in testing, for instance in-vitro approaches (laboratory techniques) or in-silico models (computerized predictions).
From Cefic-LRI, some funded projects and initiatives were presented:
- Dr. Katharina Schwarz (Fraunhofer Institute for Toxicology and Experimental Medicine – ITEM, Germany), presented the project B21, “In vitro Data to Parameterise PBPK Models For Inhalation Exposure”.
- Mark R. Viant (University of Birmingham, UK), on behalf of the MATCHING team, introduced the project C8, “MetAbolomics ring-Trial for CHemical groupING (MATCHING) – Assessing the Reproducibility of Metabolomics Within a Regulatory Context Through a Multi-laboratory Ring-trial”.
- Sylvia Escher (Fraunhofer Institute for Toxicology and Experimental Medicine, Germany), presented a poster on the project C9: “Zet-O-Map- Identify principal molecular drivers of (dys)morphogenesis in zebrafish”.
- Bruno Hubesch, Cefic-LRI Consultant, also presented a poster on the AMBIT3 predictive toxicity tool. The software provides a web service and user-friendly web interface to a chemical database, various chemical structure search facilities and toxicity prediction models.
Read the full report of the conference here.