02/05/2023

Manuel Pastor and Karolina Kopanska, members of the PharmacoInformatics (Phi) group of GRIB/UPF, participated in the RISK-HUNT3R General Assembly meeting

RISK-HUNT3R, short for "RISK assessment of chemicals integrating HUman centric Next generation Testing strategies promoting the 3Rs", is a European Research & Innovation project funded under the European Commission's Horizon 2020 programme. More precisely, RISK-HUNT3R is the new European effort to develop a new modular framework for animal-free Next Generation Risk Assessment (NGRA) driven by world-leading experts from various disciplines. The RISK-HUNT3R vision is to combine human exposure scenarios, in vitro hazard assessment, and NAM-based toxicokinetic and toxicodynamic testing, followed by integrative risk assessment via computational approaches and decision-making based on weight of evidence.

This event saw ~100 consortium attendees discussing the project's progress and preliminary outcomes of the ASPIS Safety Profiling Algorithm (ASPA) supporting the toxicological NGRA. At the event, Phi members presented their contributions to the  development of computational tools and in silico prediction models that support the RISK-HUNT3R vision. Currently, the group is working on the development of a user-friendly platform that is meant to guide toxicologists throughout the ASPA workflow. This platform will facilitate the documentation of performed steps and the derivation of assessment conclusions based on the collected results. Moreover, the group presented their uncertainty assessment tool which integrates the principles of the Dempster-Shafer theory.