World Congress on Alternatives

The World Congress on Alternatives and Animal Use in the Life Sciences is where scientists from academia, industry, government, and the non-profit sector meet to advance the 3Rs—to reduce, refine, and replace the use of animals. This year the conference – WC12 – is being held at Niagara Falls in Canada.1 The conference is organized …

Update from QSAR 2023

We recently attended the 20th International Workshop on (Q)SAR in Environmental and Health Sciences (QSAR 2023) held in Copenhagen. It was a great meeting with many interesting topics, including read-across approaches, new methods, and applications of (Q)SARs. We were happy to provide a course on regulatory uses of in silico modelling, covering different applications across …

Nine Instem Posters at the 2023 SOT Meeting

Instem will again have a large presence at this year’s Society of Toxicology meeting in Nashville.1 As part of the scientific program, we will be co-authoring on nine posters covering the spectrum of scientific topics where we are undertaking research and development activities. This work supports many regulatory mandates and guidelines, including SEND, carcinogenicity risk …

Computational toxicology 2022 year-end review

The computational toxicology group here at Instem has had another busy year that has resulted in six publications and book chapters1-6, completion of existing and initiation of new collaborative working groups, as well as significant updates to our computational toxicology solutions. We have been collaborating on a number of research topics related to the in …

Acute Toxicity in silico Battery

We are happy to have completed, after many years of work, a full battery of in silico models to evaluate acute toxicity. These models predict acute lethality by three routes of exposure (oral, dermal, inhalation), as well as skin and eye irritation/corrosion, and skin sensitization. They aim to support a variety of applications, including health, …

New in silico paper on acute toxicity

We are pleased to announce the publication of a new paper “Principles and Procedures for Assessment of Acute Toxicity Incorporating In Silico Methods”.1 This paper presents the results from a significant cross-industry collaboration to support the application of in silico methods for (1) product research and development, (2) product approval and registration as well as …

Predicting the 6-pack

The 6-pack provides information on health hazards from short-term exposure to a test substance. It is a battery of in vivo tests that evaluate 1) acute systemic toxicity by different routes of exposure (i.e., oral, inhalation and dermal); 2) skin and eye irritation/corrosion; 3) dermal sensitization. It is used in the assessment of many products …

Computational toxicology at the SOT 2021 Meeting

We are happy to be presenting at this year’s virtual SOT meeting1 on a number of topics throughout the course of the event. On Monday 15th March at 3pm (EST), we are covering some new areas at the session “Hot Topics in Computational Toxicology: New Developments that Support Regulatory Submissions.” This includes a discussion on …

Are (Q)SAR models fit-for-purpose for classification and labelling?

We were recently involved in a cross-industry project to determine whether (Q)SAR models were fit-for-purpose for classification and labelling. To test this hypothesis, a series of companies across different industrial sectors each compiled a data set of chemicals with experimental acute rat oral data. These chemicals were run against the first version of the Leadscope …