Satisfying REACH Requirements with OpenTox

David Gallagher, UK

It has been estimated that the European Union's REACH legislation on the safety assessment of chemicals will require between 9 million and 54 million additional test animals, if no alternative methods for toxicity prediction are accepted. However, the number of test animals could be significantly reduced by utilizing existing experimental data in conjunction with (Quantitative) Structure Activity Relationship ((Q)SAR) models.

To address the challenge, the European Commission funded the OpenTox (www.OpenTox.org) project to develop an open source web-service-based framework, that provides unified access to experimental toxicity data, in silico models (including (Q)SAR), and validation/reporting procedures.

Now, in the final year of the initial three-year project, the achievements of the project will be reviewed along with a summary of test results on two prototype end-user applications from the project, ToxPredict and ToxCreate.  These applications have been publically accessible on the internet during their development and can be used via any internet browser.