Read-Across is increasingly being used.
This is an example for the number of scientific articles using
Read-Across between 2000 and February this year, and
you can see how publications and citations were steadily increasing
with respect to the terms Read-Across combined with toxic.
So it is something which is emerging.
And this has to do with both the availability of data, the need for
safety assessments from [INAUDIBLE] chemicals as
we have discussed in the series and also simply the capabilities
running big datasets with the respect of computing power.
The first mentioning of Read-Across as a term we could identify so
far goes back to the year 2000.
This abstract at a conference reproduced on toxicology letters said,
read-across of toxicological data and the notification of new chemicals and
I think this is the grandfather of all they've begun to present.
The reason why these technologies are being used at
the moment increasingly is especially the European REACH legislation.
We have made reference this legislation several times even recall that
Europe went ahead about ten years earlier than the most recent
reauthorization of the toxic substance control in the West.
Europe started in 2006 with the REACH legislation, which is regulating
the existing and new chemicals, industrial chemicals on the European market.
And we have seen so far two phase in deadlines 2010 and
2013 where chemicals produced or
marketed in the European Union above 1,000 tons in 2010 and
above 100 tons in 2013 had to be registered.
And quite impressively 75% of this dossiers use Read-Across.
It is one of the most common used approaches in this dossiers.
Other alternative methods, cell cultures, quantitative structure,
activity relationship and others are hardly used.
At the same time, the expertise how to do Read-Across is actually very
low in the industry with the notably exception of the big chemical
companies who have their own departments for safety assessments.
And sometimes often do have some computation
toxicologists skilled also read-across.
The majority of companies has no expertise in this at all and as you have seen,
the scientific literature on Read-Across is only emerging.
So there is, at this moment,
not really an agreement on how to do Read-Across properly.
And for the first two deadlines,
we have also seen that the European Chemical Agency,
EChA did accept of those checked so far only very few.
And this creates a situation where there's a discrepancy of the possible utility,
the possible speed up and
cost saving of this technology and the available knowledge how to perform.