The European Commission recently launched a public consultation to receive feedback on the jointly drafted preliminary opinion on risk assessment of the Scientific Committee on Emerging and Newly Identified Health Risks (SCENIHR), Scientific Committee on Consumer Safety (SCCS) and the Scientific Committee on Health and Environmental Risks (SCHER).
In November 30th, 2012 the Policy Affairs Working Group of the VPH Institute responded to the questionnaire on the discussion paper titled "Addressing the New Challenges for Risk Assessment".
Of particular relevance for the VPH in the paper was the call for a “new conceptual framework in risk assessment” which would foresee the transition from in-vivo to in-vitro and eventually to in-silico models of risk assessment.
In its response to the consultation, the Institute emphasized the potentialities of the VPH technology which enables a fully personalised and integrative investigation of human physiology in health and disease by means of computer modelling, combining both external (e.g. environmental exposure, food intake) and internal (e.g. genomic, toxicokinetic) factors. Thanks to the integrative modelling of complex systems, it will be possible to contribute to the educated improvement of risk assessment and preventive medicine with a consequent potential for major positive impacts on healthcare systems. Moreover the application of this advance technology to rationalise and focus experiments will contribute to the refinement, reduction and replacement of animal testing.
The full textof the Consultation is available here.
