Read-Across – Recent developments and regulatory implications

Arianna Bassan is a consultant and European Registered Toxicologist (ERT) with a multidisciplinary background in chemistry, biology, and toxicology. As co-founder of Innovatune, she specializes in human health hazard assessment integrating (Q)SAR, read-across, and computational methods. She has led international groups on in silico toxicology and is now extending this work to AI-based toxicological risk assessment. She is the author of numerous peer-reviewed publications and reports.

Susanne Hougaard Bennekou has been a Chief Advisor at the Danish Patient Safety Authority since last year. She has worked in the Division of Risk Assessment and Nutrition at the National Food Institute of the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) as a Senior Advisor in toxicology since 2019. Previously she was a Senior Advisor in the Pesticide Division of the Danish EPA. She was the Vice-Chair of the EFSA PPR Panel, a Vice-Chair of the EFSA Scientific Committee and since 2024 she has been the Chair of the EFSA Scientific Committee.

Steven J. Enoch is a Reader in Computational Toxicology at the School of Pharmacy and Biomolecular Sciences of the Faculty of Science at the Liverpool John Moores University and has over 15 years’ worth of experience in the field of predictive toxicology. He is an expert in the use of chemical and metabolism information to predict toxicological hazard without the use of animals, especially in the development and application of computational profiling schemes for chemical category formation and read-across.

Sylvia Escher is a Chemist and trained Toxicologist and the Head of the Department of In-silico Toxicology at the Fraunhofer Institute for Toxicology and Experimental Medicine (ITEM). The focus of her work the use of alternative methods such as QSAR models and grouping approaches in safety and risk assessment. This include the development and maintenance of toxicological databases. For some years now, the integration of new methods in human risk assessment, such as those developed in the EUTOXRISK and EXITOX project, has increasingly become the focus of their work. In this context ITEM is developing workflows to integrate omic data as well as PBK models, specialized on uptake and distribution of airborne compounds.

Monika Kemény is a Certified Toxicologist and has been a Regulatory Toxicologist at BASF, Germany, since 2006. Before joining BASF she has worked for the DFG Senate Commission on Food Safety (SKLM) since 2002.

Juan Parra Morte has been Toxicologist in the Pesticide Peer Review Unit of EFSA since 2008. He has been actively involved in the assessment of pesticide active substances, their metabolites and impurities, including the EFSA PPR, the OECD Guidance on Residue Definition and EFSA's outsourced projects on the Genotoxicity Database and QSAR and Read-Across for the genotoxicity of metabolites. He is chairing the EFSA Working Group on NAMs QSARs.

Martin Wilks is a Medical Toxicologist and risk assessment expert with more than 30 years of experience in academia, industry and the health service. He is Adjunct Professor of Toxicology at the University of Basel. From 2009 to 2023 he has been the Director fo the Swiss Centre for Applied Human Toxicolgoy (SCAHT) and from 2012 to 2023 Adjunct Professor at the University of Geneva. He is a EUROTOX Registered Toxicologist, a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, Secretary-General of EUROTOX and President-elect of the International Union of Toxicology (IUTOX).