News in computational toxicology

The paper discusses the global regulatory requirements for assessing the systemic toxicity of chemicals through various exposure routes (oral, dermal, and inhalation) for human health risk assessment. It focuses on the efforts of the International Cooperation on Alternative Test Methods (ICATM) to identify opportunities for using non-animal replacements for these tests.

Both papers present a way to address one of the major challenge of chemical safety assessment that is the sheer scale of the assessment exercise: a new classification scheme designed to lead to the same levels of protection, without necessarily aiming to predict adverse effects in animal studies. The new classification scheme will rank chemicals into three levels of concern (high, medium and low) based on toxicodynamic (TD) and toxicokinetic (TK) considerations.

A new publication reports on a 2021 symposium that explored the use of new approach methodologies for regulatory decision making for tobacco products.