A Study Of Challenges And Risk Assessment of Toxic Mixtures In Chemical Research

Abstract

For many years, the effort to establish toxicity testing for mixtures has struggled against many challenges. Data gaps in exposure and toxicity data, experimental design shortcomings, lack of statistical analysis, time limitations, unavailability of funds, and least but not last, a lack of awareness that chemical exposure is most often to mixtures not to single chemicals. Today, communities repeatedly raise chemical exposure concerns at town hall and community meetings. This has brought new awareness to issues such as (1) adequate research on mixtures, (2) implementation of the assessment methodologies, and (3) application of technological advancements. And recently, calls from funding agencies for interdisciplinary collaboration have further heightened interest in the National Academy of Sciences new approach to advancement of mixtures research. With today s rapid communication methods, consortia can share methods and data within and among fields of biological science in ways previously impossible. Examples are numerous of new and innovative interdisciplinary approaches and shared technologies. Work has progressed in the confident belief that computational toxicology will become an important tool in developing modeling approaches, and that it will complement mechanistically-based toxicology studies in solving mixtures risk assessment problems. newlineBut toxicologists have not arrived easily at this long-sought for, mixtures- development phase. Before toxicology became a formal academic discipline when toxicology studies were focused on single chemicals the nature and action of chemical mixtures was pursued through a theoretical approach. In this groundbreaking introduction of the concept of joint action newlineor, as commonly used, joint toxic action , advanced approaches that to date are an important assessment tool in analyzing and studying mixtures.