Mapping ExpoCast onto ToxCast

Abstract

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) established the program known as ToxCast to develop ways to predict potential toxicity of chemicals and to develop a cost-effective approach for prioritizing the thousands of chemicals that require toxicity testing. ToxCast uses advanced science tools to help to understand how normal human body processes are impacted by exposures to chemicals and to help determine which exposures are most likely to lead to adverse health effects. Such toxicity information must be integrated with exposure information to prioritize chemicals awaiting risk assessment. Thus, EPA is integrating its exposure-based chemical prioritization program, ExpoCast, with ToxCast to prioritize chemicals. This presentation will discuss recent approaches, such as statistical and graphical extrapolations from data-rich to data-poor chemicals, chemical analysis of dust and other media as indicators of near-field exposure, application of high tier models (e.g., SHEDS-Lite and SHEDS-Fugacity models) to high throughput screening, dose ranking approaches, and “big data” techniques (including informatics and data mining) combined with product use and activity data (e.g. material safety data sheets, consumer self-reported data and the Consolidated Human Activities Database).