PARENT SESSION

1F - QSAR
Hall 13
8:30 AM - 12:30 PM, Tuesday, 29 April 2003
Chair: Schüürmann, G.¹, ¹
Co-chair: Verhaar, H.J.M.², Cronin, M.³, ^{2 3}

(TU13/1) Establishment of a European Framework for Promoting the Acceptance of QSARs for the Assessment of Chemicals.

Worth, Andrew¹, Van Leeuwen , Cornelius¹, ¹ JRC Institute for Health & Consumer Protection, Ispra, Varese, Italy

ABSTRACT- At present, the use of QSARs for the regulatory assessment of chemicals is very limited, perhaps due to widespread concerns about the extent to which QSAR estimates can be relied upon. However, legislation being developed in the European Union proposes to introduce a new regulatory system called REACH (Registration, Evaluation, and Authorisation of Chemicals), which will impose equivalent information requirements on both New and Existing Chemicals. For reasons of practicality, cost-effectiveness and animal welfare, it is envisaged that QSARs will play an important role in the assessment of some 30,000 existing chemicals for which further information may be required under the REACH system. It is therefore imperative that QSAR estimates can be relied upon. To overcome the barriers in the acceptance of QSARs for regulatory purposes, it is widely acknowledged that there needs to be international agreement on the acceptability criteria that are applicable during the development and validation QSARs, and that such criteria should be applied to candidate QSAR models in the context of an independent framework. The Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission provides independent scientific and technical advice to EU policy makers, and is therefore ideally suited to the establishment of an independent framework for promoting the acceptance of QSARs. This presentation describes a new activity on QSARs being undertaken at the JRC, in collaboration with the OECD and other organisations, such as the US EPA. The main aim of the JRC activity is to establish a framework for the independent selection, confirmation, validation and dissemination of QSARs, thereby promoting the acceptance of QSARs.

Key words: chemicals, quantitative structure-activity relationship, legislation, regulatory acceptance