Connecting exposure, toxicokinetics and toxicity for food safety
You are invited to attend a seminar by Dr. Jean-Lou Dorne, Senior Scientific Officer, European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). This seminar will be hosted as part of the course FDSC 626: Food Safety Risk Assessment, but everyone is welcome to join!
Chemical risk assessment in the food safety area involves the classic steps bringing hazard and exposure for risk characterisation. In the food safety area, sound hazard identification and hazard characterisation requires an understanding of both toxicokinetic (TK) (absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion of chemicals (ADME)) and toxicodynamic (TD) processes for compounds entering the human body via the oral route. This enables the translation of exposure, expressed as an external dose, into an internal dose and toxicity for sound dose response modelling. This presentation aims to give examples of harmonisation of methodologies using the recent guidance on the use of weight of evidence approaches as well and illustrate the development of open source tools at EFSA including openfoodtox , a toxicity DB and TK plate, a TK modelling platform for human health, animal health and ecological risk assessment of food and feed chemicals. Future developments of global risk assessment tools in the food safety area are discussed in the context of mechanistic alternatives to animal testing such as in silico and in vitro tools and tiered weight of evidence approaches tailored to support risk assessors in a practical way. International cooperation between national and international scientific advisory bodies and academic institutions concludes as the corner stone for the translation of 21st century toxicological research into harmonised methodologies and tools and for the training of the next generation of risk assessors.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Since 2006, Dr Jean Lou Dorne has been a senior scientific officer at the European Food Safety Authority in the Scientific Committee and Emerging Risks Unit after 9 years of research at the University of Southampton (UK). His current work focuses on the development of harmonised methodologies applied to human health, animal health and ecological risk assessment of chemicals including chemical mixtures, integration of modern animal free methods and models with a particular emphasis on toxicokinetics and metabolism.