The Past, Present, and Future of Chemical Risk Assessment

Chemicals are essential components of our everyday life, from industrial chemicals used for manufacturing processes to the active principles of pharmaceuticals. As a consequence, whether it is accidental or deliberate, the population is now acutely and chronically exposed to chemicals, which has strengthened the need for improved methods of chemical risk assessment. Decades of experience with animal-based toxicity testing strategies have shown that their collective prediction of human risk is not satisfactory. Thus there is now a focus on developing human-based in vitro models with the goal to overcome this predictivity gap. New approaches which integrate human-derived cell cultures with sensitive mechanistic biomarkers of toxicity together with biokinetics look like promising alternatives to animal models. This chapter provides an overview of the past and present methods to develop new chemical entities and strategies employed to assess their toxicity.
Source: Springer protocols feed by Pharmacology/Toxicology - Category: Drugs & Pharmacology Source Type: news