Protocol for probabilistic risk assessment of perfluoroctanoic acid (PFOA)

Hovedbudskap

The project ‘Ontology-driven and artificial intelligence-based repeated dose toxicity testing of chemicals for next generation risk assessment’ (ONTOX) under the EU programme Horizon 2020 is running from 01.05.21 to 30.04.26 and is coordinated by Vrije Universiteit, Brussel, Belgium (website ONTOX project). 

The vision of ONTOX is to provide a functional and sustainable solution for advancing human risk assessment of chemicals without the use of animals in line with the principles of 21st century toxicity testing and next generation risk assessment. 

ONTOX will perform a case study on probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) on the selected chemical perfluoroctanoic acid (PFOA).

The expo-sure assessment will use already established methods from the newly published scoping re-view, “Accessible methods and tools to estimate chemical exposure in humans to support risk as-sessment: a systematic scoping review”, or cus-tom-made methods using R. 

The hazard charac-terisation will use some published methods as a starting point which will be adjusted and com-bined to fit this case study. The hazard identifica-tion/characterisation will use data from published literature and on in vitro data produced in ONTOX.  

The whole ONTOX toolbox will be used in this risk assessment, such as physiological based kinetic (PBK) models, quantitative in vivo in vitro extrapolation (QIVIVE), physiological maps (PMs) and boolean models , and a large transformer-based AI model.

This is a protocol for the case study on PFOA, which will provide a proof-of-principle of PRA using in vitro studies.