Current global prosperity and modern health care relies upon the safe use of chemicals in industry, agriculture and medicine. This prosperity is entirely dependent upon robust toxicology for hazard identification and risk assessment. Today’s challenges in improving toxicology are both practical and ethical. Practical challenges include the facts that only a fraction of the chemicals used in the chemical industry have been tested for toxicity, and that many of the animal studies used to describe the toxicity of chemicals are of limited use for assessing human risk. The ethical challenge is to generate useful toxicology data with minimum animal suffering and to comply with existing and new legislation.
TOXIFATE will help change the paradigm of chemical safety assessment and train toxicologists of the future in the fundamental knowledge and experimental skillsets that are required to bring about an in vitro and in silico revolution in modern toxicology.
Objectives
- To elucidate the quantitative relationships between cell stress and cell death responses using new in vitro biosensor assays.
- To use the newly generated data describing these quantitative relationships to build and test new computational tools for toxicity prediction.
- To address an existing deficit in post-graduate education of toxicologists within the EU by training the next generation of toxicologists in state-of-the-art innovative in vitro and in silico technologies that are central for the proposed multi-disciplinary research and the future of advanced safety assessment strategies.
