Future Use of Read-across and Transcriptome Data for Safety Assessment of Cosmetics

<p>Ten years have passed since the 7th revision of the EU Cosmetics Directive, which banned the sale of cosmetics containing ingredients that have been tested on animals in the EU. While there is no standardized alternative method, especially for systemic toxicity assessment, the safety assessment of cosmetics is based more on a combination of available information and test results, as exemplified by the Next Generation Risk Assessment (NGRA) framework. When NOAEL of the substance to be evaluated (target) are not available, the next approach is considered to be read-across. Read-across, which estimates the toxicity of a target based on information analogs, has already become a standard safety assessment method with widespread use in many industries. Although read-across is one of the lower tiers in the NGRA, the lack of a database from which sufficient analogs and their toxicity information can be collected remains a challenge. Another issue is the difficulty in explaining the toxicological relevance of the selected analogs. In recent years, there has been much attention paid to the investigation of new read-across methods based on chemical structure information combined with in vitro systems such as transcriptome data. To solve these problems, we have been developing a comprehensive read-across method to extract analogs from more than 200 million compounds in the world and a method to extract analogs based on transcriptome data, aiming to expand read-across to mixtures of compounds such as extracts in the future. In this symposium, we will present the latest trends and challenges in safety evaluation methods using read-across and transcriptome data, as well as the results of our latest studies on our efforts.</p>