New Chemicals Collaborative Research Program for risk assessments of new chemical substances
In February 2022, EPA launched a new program under the TSCA to modernize the process and bring innovative science to the review of new chemicals before they can enter the marketplace. Under the New Chemicals Collaborative Research Program, EPA’s Office of Research and Development is working with the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention to advance five key research areas:
- Updates and refinements to chemical analogue and category approaches.
- Development and expansion of databases containing TSCA chemical information.
- Development and refinement of predictive models for physicochemical properties, environmental fate/transport, hazard, exposure, and toxicokinetics.
- Integration and application of in vitro NAMs.
- Development of a TSCA new chemicals decision support tool to modernize the process.
Each of these five research areas represents translation and extension of computational toxicology research that has been in development under the vision of the CompTox Blueprint (Thomas et al. 2019) and the 2021 EPA NAMs Work Plan, which together form a strategic roadmap for developing and integrating NAMs to fill information gaps, establishing scientific confidence of NAM application, and engaging with stakeholders. EPA announced the program in February 2022. A public meeting in April 2022 provided an overview of the program and gave individual stakeholders an opportunity to provide input. Subsequently a 2023-2026 research plan was reviewed by the Board of Scientific Counselors in October 2022 with a final report posted in early 2023. In 2023, the program advanced multiple research objectives, including publications of research evaluation of chemical and analogue approaches, cheminformatics-driven selection of chemicals to include in an in vitro NAM proof-of-concept, and the beginning of screening work on that proof-of-concept.