Study Assesses Performance of Skin Sensitization Prediction Tool
The results of a recent study support the tool Skin Sensitization Risk Assessment – Integrated Chemical Environment (SARA-ICE) as “an approach for hazard identification and exposure-led safety assessment within next-generation risk assessment frameworks,” according to a paper published recently in NAM Journal. SARA-ICE is an open-access web tool that is intended to help users predict a chemical’s skin sensitization potential from an uploaded data set. The journal article describes SARA-ICE as “a Bayesian framework for quantitative skin sensitization hazard and potency assessment [that] estimates an ED01, the dermal dose associated with a 1% sensitization probability in humans.”
The authors of the open-access paper examined the performance of the tool’s two models, SARA-ICE DA and SARA-ICE Extended. The paper states that SARA-ICE DA is “a fixed defined approach (DA) for point-of-departure derivation” and explains that SARA-ICE Extended can be used to predict the classification of human skin sensitizers according to the Globally Harmonized System of Classification and Labeling of Chemicals. The authors used in chemico and in vitro skin sensitization data for 180 substances to assess how the two versions SARA-ICE performed when compared with human and murine data as well as the defined approaches included in OECD Guideline No. 497, Defined Approaches on Skin Sensitization. OECD, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, is an international organization focused on finding solutions to social, economic, and environmental challenges.
Published last year by the National Toxicology Program (NTP), SARA-ICE was created by the NTP Interagency Center for the Evaluation of Alternative Toxicological Methods (NICEATM), which develops and evaluates alternatives to animal use for chemical safety testing, and the company Unilever. It can be accessed from the NTP website.
The paper, titled “Deriving a Point-of-Departure for Skin Sensitization Risk Assessments, Application of the SARA-ICE Tool to a Diverse Set of Chemicals,” is available from the website of NAM Journal.