ChemFORWARD’s Lauren Heine & Chris Bartlett to Present at the SOT 61st Annual Meeting and ToxExpo

Lauren Heine, Ph. D., ChemFORWARD Co-Founder and Director of Science and Data Integrity, and Chris Bartlett,Ph.D, ChemFORWARD Lead Toxicologist, will be presenting at the Society of Toxicology 61st Annual Meeting and ToxExpo on Sunday, March 27th in San Diego, California.

The SOT is a premiere society for toxicologists in the US with the mission to create a safer and healthier world by advancing the science, and increasing the impact of toxicology. A professional and scholarly organization of scientists from academic institutions, government, and industry, it represents the great variety of scientists who practice toxicology in the US and abroad.

Heine will present how ChemFORWARD can be used to avoid regrettable substitutions in an informational session on Safer Chemical Tools and Practices: Successes in Advancing Safer Chemical Selection on a Global Scale. Bartlett will present as part of a continuing education (CE) course on Principles and Applications of Read-Across in Human Health Risk Assessment. Participants in the course will understand the potential and limitations of read-across as a strategy to predict toxicity for a range of hazard endpoints and to fill data gaps. Read-across is a structured way to use data available for one chemical to predict the toxicity of another chemical that does not have data, but that is similar in molecular structure.  

As governments move away from the use of animal testing - especially for cosmetics, read-across and other new approach methods (NAMs) are increasingly important for manufacturers and product formulators to make more informed decisions about which chemicals to use in products. While read-across cannot be used for all hazard endpoints and it will take time for regulators to adopt NAMs, the SOT forum is an important exchange to understand best practices and limitations. 

Bartlett will demonstrate how read-across is used at ChemFORWARD using a case study based on a chemical hazard assessment (CHA) conducted by ToxServices that was able to fill some - but not all - data gaps using read across which led to greater confidence in the inherent low hazard of a cosmetic ingredient.

Moving to non-animal test methods is the future of toxicology; but users need to be sure that the predictive tools and use of read-across is robust and reliable. ChemFORWARD Assessors are experts in using read-across and other NAMs to fill data gaps. In this way, ChemFORWARD’s shared repository of chemical hazard assessments are some of the most comprehensive available.