Chemicals form the basis for life, and increase the quality of life, but also result in unintended adverse consequences to health and the environment. Many approaches have been developed to evaluate chemical safety to prevent harm. Great advances have been made, but current testing approaches are not sufficiently informative and are too costly to evaluate the inventory of nearly 80,000 chemicals reported to be in commercial use. Further, traditional tests are largely animal-based, sacrificing tens of thousands of animals annually. Recent advances in biology and high speed computing provide a basis for efficient, cost-effective, hypothesis based predictive non-animal approaches (National Academy of Science’s 2007 “Toxicity Testing in the 21<sup>st</sup> Century”). These will be discussed in the context of the concepts of adverse outcome pathways, and an integrated approach to testing and assessment, to help better train students to understand and predict chemical toxicity and to help design greener chemicals.

Harnessing toxicity testing in the 21st century to help train chemists

250th National Meeting (2015)

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