Chairs: Marketa Dvorakova & Anne Kienhuis
The ever-increasing scientific body of knowledge on health and disease, together with the ongoing development of innovative in vitro and in silico NAMs, offers opportunities for animal-free safety assessment. To fully leverage the promise of NAMs and, at the same time, ensure safety, intersectoral and interdisciplinary collaborations are necessary. This is explored in the Virtual Human Platform for Safety Assessment project (VHP4Safety). VHP4Safety is a Dutch funded research project that runs from 2021 to 2026 and brings together international partners from 32 organisations representing scientists, industry, regulators, policy makers, clinicians and NGO’s. During the projects’ Designathons and Hackathons, data scientists, toxicologists and social scholars collaborate (1) to build a data infrastructure to integrate existing and newly developed data and services at the Virtual Human Platform (VHP), (2) to feed the VHP with toxicological knowledge and NAM data, and (3) to implement the VHP taking into account stakeholder perspectives. In this session, we present how the VHP4Safety interdisciplinary approach has laid the groundwork for an integrated in silico description of human physiology, using three specific case studies as proofs of principle. These case studies address human relevant scenario’s on sex and age differences in thyroid-mediated brain development upon chemical exposure, lifelong exposure to chemicals and Parkinson’s Disease, and drug-induced kidney function failure. During this session, we showcase the integration of the case studies on the platform, using the kidney case study as an example, addressing the VHP’s usability and acceptance towards application in a future next-generation safety assessment based on human data.
The Virtual Human Platform for Safety Assessment (VHP4Safety) project is funded by the Netherlands Research Council (NWO) Netherlands Research Agenda: Research on Routes by Consortia (NWA-ORC 1292.19.272).
Speakers
- Marvin Martens – The VHP4Safety Platform: OPEN AND FAIR IN SILICO SERVICES FOR NEXT-GENERATION SAFETY ASSESSMENT
- Isaac Ortega Alavarado – Usability and acceptance of NAM-based safety assessment of the Virtual Human Platform
- Elena Sendino Garví – hiPSC-DERIVED KIDNEY ORGANOID AS A ROBUST MODEL TO STUDY TACROLIMUS-INDUCED NEPHROTOXICITY