Faculty member joins major NIH-funded center to improve chemical safety assessment
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Animal testing has long been part of chemical safety assessment, but many industrial and consumer-use chemicals still lack direct safety data, and testing each compound individually is impractical.
One potential solution is read-across, an approach that predicts a chemical’s safety based on evidence from similar compounds. However, broader regulatory use of read-across has been limited by insufficient data.
A major new award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and its National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) will support efforts to address that challenge by integrating human-relevant laboratory models and computational methods into chemical safety assessment.
Part of that effort is Robert Uyetani Collegiate Professor Salman Khetani as the UIC subcontract principal investigator on the NAMs-Decision Center: New Approach Methods for Decisions on Industrial and Consumer-Use Chemicals, led by Dr. Ivan Rusyn, School of Veterinary Medicine Department of Veterinary Physiology and Pharmacology professor at Texas A&M University.
Khetani is also UIC’s Richard and Loan Hill Department of Biomedical Engineering associate department head and director of graduate studies.
The new center is part of NIH’s broader efforts to expand the use of new approach methodologies (NAMs), including advanced laboratory models and computational tools, to improve how chemicals are evaluated for safety. These approaches can help reduce reliance on animal testing while generating information that is more directly relevant to human biology.
While read-across is a practical strategy for evaluating large numbers of chemicals, regulatory acceptance has been limited by insufficient data on how compounds are absorbed, metabolized, and affect human tissues. The NAMs-Decision Center aims to help fill those gaps by combining human-based in vitro models with in silico approaches to generate stronger evidence for chemical comparisons and regulatory decision-making.
At UIC, Khetani and his team will refine in vitro models of the human gut and liver, which are critical for understanding how many compounds are absorbed and metabolized by the body. Other investigators at the center will complement these efforts with in vitro models of the human kidney and machine learning methods to make predictions from the collected data.
The center will also support training, outreach, and stakeholder engagement to encourage industry and regulatory agencies to adopt the developed technologies and workflows.
By strengthening the evidence used to compare related compounds with human-relevant data, the center aims to make chemical safety assessment more efficient and, most importantly, better aligned with public health needs.