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.

Frank Bringezu is Associate Director of Chemical and Preclinical Safety at Merck Healthcare in Darmstadt, Germany. He holds a Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Chemistry from Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg and a degree in Toxicology and Environmental Science from the University of Leipzig. With extensive experience in preclinical drug development, chemical safety assessment, and toxicology, he contributes to international consortia and lectures in postgraduate toxicology programmes.

Ester Carregal Romero is a Policy Analyst at the Environmental Health and Safety Division at the OECD in Paris. She coordinates different projects related to the hazard assessment of chemicals, reporting of chemical safety data, and the OECD Test Guidelines Programme. A chemist by training, Ester obtained a Ph.D. in Materials Science at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. She complemented her education with a MSc. in Chemical Innovation and Regulation at the University of Bologna and Heriot-Watt University.

Mark Cronin is Professor of Predictive Toxicology in the School of Pharmacy and Biomolecular Sciences at Liverpool John Moores University, UK. He is an expert in the use of in silico approaches in non-animal chemical safety assessment and has over 35 years expertise in computational toxicology focusing on the development and application of (quantitative) structure-activity relationships ((Q)SARs) and read-across. In addition, he has developed other areas of expertise including the quantification of Adverse Outcome Pathways (qAOPs), the development of Thresholds of Toxicological Concern (TTC) and the creation of robust structure-based profilers for in silico screening of ecotoxicological and human health effects.

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.

Cathy C. Lester is a Principal Scientist at The Procter & Gamble Company in the USA, where she specializes in human safety utilizing her chemistry background. In her role, she leads the P&G Metabolism Expert Team and spearheads research focused on animal alternative methods, particularly emphasizing read-across strategies. She leads a team dedicated to automating P&G's read-across approaches, aiming to minimize reliance of the practice on expert judgment.

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.

Katarzyna Przybylak is a Computational Chemist at Unilever’s Safety, Environmental and Regulatory Science in UK, where she is actively involved in applying in silico methods and read-across approaches to support risk assessment. She is passionate about bridging academic research, industrial needs and regulatory practice, contributing to the advancement of science-based, ethical approaches in consumer safety. She has co-authored numerous scientific publications at the intersection of chemistry, computational toxicology and chemical safety.

Mark Viant is Professor of Metabolomics at the University of Birmingham, the Director of Phenome Centre Birmingham (the University’s metabolomics centre), and co-Founder of the University spin-out company - Michabo Health Science Ltd.. His research focuses on developing and applying metabolomics to regulatory toxicology, in particular by identifying molecular mechanistic solutions to the chemical safety challenges faced by industry and regulators. Mark contributes significantly to the development of standards in toxico-metabolomics, in part by leading the metabolomics activities within the OECD’s chemical safety programme. He has co-authored over 200 publications, is a past President of the International Metabolomics Society, and his work has been recognised by the award of a Lifetime Honorary Fellowship from that society.

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).