Title: An integrated interdisciplinary approach to animal-free nanomaterial and chemical safety assessment.

Marie Curie - Innovative Training Network (ITN)
Participant's number: 13
Role: Partner
Project number: H2020-MSCA-ITN-2016 - 721975
Project website: estiv.org/in3/

Objective: The in3 project is a Marie Curie Innovative Training Network that aims to drive the synergistic development and utilisation of in vitro and in silico tools for human chemical and nanomaterial (NM) safety assessment. The project will focus on differentiation of human induced Pluripotent Stem Cells (hiPSC) to toxicologically relevant target tissues including; brain, lung, liver and kidney. The tissues, from the same genetic backgrounds, will be exposed to several compounds and the data generated will be used to develop safety assessment approaches by integrating cheminformatics, mechanistic toxicology and biokinetics into computational models. The project will hire 15 PhD students to carry out these activities in a coordinated and highly collaborative fashion. The scientists trained within in3 will acquire a unique multidisciplinary skill set giving them a competitive employment advantage in safety assessment sciences either in industry, governmental bodies or academia.

Core scientific activities:

•  Differentiation of well-characterised human iPSC into brain, lung, liver, kidney and vascular cells
•  Delineation of tissue specific and donor specific effects of compound exposures (uptake, metabolism, extrusion, and mechanistic toxicity)
•  Development and optimisation of quantitative adverse outcome pathways (qAOPs) for each target organ which will be unified in an organism-level model
•  Optimisation of QSAR and read-across tools for safety assessment
•  Ultimately to create a unified expandable integrated testing strategy for chemical and NM safety assessment