Costanza Rovida

TL;DR: The costs — both in animal lives and euros — of the European REACH legislation on chemical testing are escalating and Thomas Hartung and Costanza Rovida argue for a suspension of certain toxicity tests.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present a roadmap for how to overcome the acknowledged scientific gaps for the full replacement of systemic toxicity testing using animals, which is a major concern for the current state of the art.

TL;DR: A focus on data quality, combined with increased attention to the scientific background of a test method, will be important drivers in the test development process, and quantitative information on all factors and key events will be fed into systems biology models that allow a probabilistic risk assessment with flexible adaptation to exposure scenarios and individual risk factors.

TL;DR: The case of skin sensitization was taken as an example to understand how possible ITS can be constructed, optimized and validated, and will require embracing and developing new concepts such as adverse outcome pathways (AOP), advanced statistical learning algorithms and machine learning, mechanistic validation and "Good ITS Practices".

TL;DR: A number of recommendations listed at the end of the report are intended to promote the progress of relevant and reliable methods toward prevalidation and validation.