Modeling for regulatory purposes (risk and safety assessment)

Abstract

Chemicals provide many key building blocks that are converted into end-use products or used in industrial processes to make products that benefit society. Ensuring the safety of chemicals and their associated products is a key regulatory mission. Current processes and procedures for evaluating and assessing the impact of chemicals on human health, wildlife, and the environment were, in general, designed decades ago. These procedures depend on generation of relevant scientific knowledge in the laboratory and interpretation of this knowledge to refine our understanding of the related potential health risks. In practice, this often means that estimates of dose-response and time-course behaviors for apical toxic effects are needed as a function of relevant levels of exposure. In many situations, these experimentally determined functions are constructed using relatively high doses in experimental animals. In absence of experimental data, the application of computational modeling is necessary to extrapolate risk or safety guidance values for human exposures at low but environmentally relevant levels. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.