Future directions in risk science

Abstract

The NexGen framework published in Environmental Health Perspectives integrates three different views on the future of chemical risk assessment. The NexGen framework emulates a fundamental change towards in chemical testing for toxicity, as outlined 2007 NRC report, Toxicity Testing in the 21st Century: A Vision and a Strategy. This framework integrates population health approaches with chemical risk assessment methods, by integrating determinants of health into the risk assessment process. Additional perspective comes from the recommendations of the 2009 NRC report, Science and Decisions: Advancing Risk Assessment. The report also calls for changes within the risk assessment process, including the enhanced role of problem formulation, the unification of non-cancer and cancer methods for deriving dose-response relationships, and cumulative risk assessment. The integration of these three driving concepts is discussed in this review expanding the strengths of these three frameworks and what they brought to the NexGen framework for risk science.