Looking at toxicodynamic variation in the human population to address chemical safety
The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has awarded a €1.6M contract to an LACDR-led consortium to assess how sensitivity to toxicity caused by chemicals varies among individual people. Currently these toxicodynamic differences are an unknown source of uncertainty when carrying out risk assessment of substances.
In collaboration with the Leiden-based Centre for Human Drug Research (CHDR), blood from healthy volunteers will be investigated for its toxicodynamic characteristics by zooming in on the activity of known cellular stress pathways via, among others, targeted transcriptomics approaches. The research project, called TD-TRAQ (“Toxicodynamic analysis based on high-throughput transcriptomics for AOP driven human population variance quantification”), is coordinated by prof. Bob van de Water and also involves the Danish Technical University and SMEs Certara and BioClavis. The overall objective is to be able to translate the variability findings into more appropriate assessment factors for EFSA to perform its chemical risk assessment for food regulation in Europe.