Project description
Advanced computational models help assess chemical toxicity
Aiming to protect people and the environment from potentially harmful substances, the EU requires chemical substances that are brought into the continent in quantities greater than 1 tonne per year to be registered in the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA). This process not only entails high costs for chemical manufacturers, importers, distributors and marketers, but it also involves conducting multiple tests on animals to verify the safety of these substances. The EU-funded QSAREACH project will develop a proprietary tool that replaces animal testing with computational models called quantitative structure-activity relationship models. These mathematical models will help predict the toxicity levels of the chemicals, saving significant time and resources.
Objective
Chemicals substances are presented in daily life like cosmetics, functional food or agro-industry. The EC Regulation
1907/2006 for Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH), for the production and use of
chemicals when they are produced/imported in/to Europe in an amount greater than 1 ton/year has two major and clear
customer paint points: first, REACH implies very high costs due to the experimental and administrative work required, which
represents a particularly sensitive issue for SMEs. Second, REACH implies the need for a huge number of animal tests to
demonstrate the safety of chemicals under approval. Animal experiments require much time for preparation and execution,
and are expensive and ethically questionable. Instead, QSAR computational models represent significant savings in time,
resources and money, since the applicability of predictive models is ease and immediate. And this business need from the
European chemical industry SMEs is our market opportunity, by the final development of a novel high scalable technological
platform of easy access to experienced and non-experienced end-users. These platform will include QSAR models of
(eco)toxicology of chemicals -including nanomaterials (NMs)- to comply with the strict EC Regulation, where assays with
animals in some specific domains, such as cosmetic, are completely forbidden. This customer self-using platform will include
an additional tool for the evaluation of the appropriateness of replacing the chemicals studied for alternative compounds
which a safer (eco)toxicological profile. ProtoQSAR is a five years’ company that arises from more than fifteen years of
activity and experience of its team members, both academic and industrial sides, currently providing consulting services
related to these predictive models used by different industries. Our goal is to make the leap from consulting through the
validation and scaling up this high-potential opportunity in its sector.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- medical and health scienceshealth sciencespublic health
- engineering and technologynanotechnologynano-materials
- medical and health sciencesbasic medicinetoxicology
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Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
SME-1 - SME instrument phase 1Coordinator
46018 Valencia
Spain
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.