Using VEGAHUB Within a Weight-of-Evidence Strategy

Abstract

Industrial needs and regulatory requirements have played a significant role in accelerating the use of nontesting methods including in silico tools as alternatives to animal testing. The main interest is not solely on the use of in silico tools, or in read-across, but on better toxicological safety assessment of substances, and for this purpose more advanced, integrated strategies have to be implemented. VEGAHUB wants to promote this broader view, not necessarily focused on a specific approach. Applying multiple tools and complementary approaches instead of one technique may provide more elements for a more robust evaluation, but at the same time it is important to have a conceptual scheme to integrate multiple, heterogeneous lines of evidence. We will show how the user can benefit from the diversity of tools available within the platform VEGAHUB for assessing the biological properties of chemical substances on an example of (non)mutagenicity.

Keywords: In silico toxicology; Read-across; Safety assessment; Structural alerts; ToxRead; VEGAHUB; Weight-of-evidence.