EBTC at AAAS 2020

14 February 2020.The challenges of maintaining population health are changing fast in our rapidly-evolving environment. Climate change, shifting disease patterns, population demographics, and environmental pollution present multiple interacting threats which require urgent, evidence-based responses.

The problem is, traditional models of research conduct, publication, and analysis cannot keep up: it can take years to provide policy-makers with decision-critical information, when action is needed now.

This symposium, organised by EBTC, presents three expert perspectives on how the AI revolution in bioinformatics is transforming our conception of how scientific research should be stored, published and accessed.

Themes for discussion include: how the technology underpinning social media platforms could revolutionize research and data storage; how big data allows scientists to better-anticipate health risks posed by an increasingly polluted environment, and an introduction to an in silico biological system for developing and testing medical treatments.

• More information on our session is here. Join us!
• A short blog post on LinkedIn is here.

New publications with EBTC authors

Artificial Intelligence for chemical risk assessment. In this paper, resulting from a workshop organised by the EU Joint Research Centre, AI specialists, risk assessors, policy-makers and systematic reviewers explore the various ways (some surprising!) in which AI may contribute to improving chemical risk assessment. Read it here (open access).

3Rs symposium

5 March 2020. The working groups on 3Rs / Alternative Methods and Computational Toxicology of the German Toxicology Society will host a symposium on "Uncertainty of toxicological assessments" at the annual society meeting in Leipzig (Germany) on March 5, 2020.

The symposium will focus on identifying, assessing and integrating uncertainties for the various types of toxicological data (in silico, in vitro and in vivo). EBTC's Sebastian Hoffmann will be presenting on "Confidence in AOPs and the in vitro methods populating them".

EBTC at SOT 2020, Anaheim CA

17 March 2020. EBTC's Katya Tsaioun is co-chairing a session with Dr. Andrew Rooney (NTP Office of Health Assessment and Translation) on "Mechanisms and Multiple Exposures: Methods to Tackle Toxicology's Most Difficult Challenges Using Systematic Review Frameworks".

This session will present approaches that have been utilized to address two principal challenges for use of systematic review methods in toxicology: (1) integrating evidence across multiple exposures, and (2) integrating evidence from mechanistic data.

The session includes talks on:

• frameworks for evidence integration and assessment in the absence of human data (Tsaioun)
• using systematic review to reach hazard conclusions across multiple exposures (Brandy Beverly, NTP OHAT)
• using AOP framework in establishing estrogenicity of alkylphenols (Katy Goyak, ExxonMobil Biomedical Sciences, Inc. and member of the EBTC Scientific Advisory Council)
• considering exposure in developing a weight-of-evidence conclusions (Daniele Wikoff, ToxStrategies, Inc. and Vice-Chair of the EBTC Scientific Advisory Council).