News collaboration Unilever
ANNOUNCEMENT OF COLLABORATION BETWEEN KREATiS, UNILEVER & LIVERPOOL JOHN MOORES UNIVERSITY
KREATiS has signed an agreement to collaborate with Unilever, joining an on-going project involving Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU), to update the scheme on Mechanisms of toxic Action (MechoA).
The first MechoA scheme was published by KREATiS in 20181 and classified molecular initiating events (MIE) between organic chemical substances and biological matrices leading to structural alerts for human health and the environment. Since then, the scheme has gone through several iterations and is now in the final phase of acceptance as a profiler in a future update to the OECD QSAR Toolbox. Similar thinking to that of KREATiS was shared by Unilever and Prof. Mark Cronin of LJMU who, in collaboration with Environment and Climate Change Canada, have recently published2 a MIE based strategy following along the same lines and adding cross-species susceptibility to several MIEs for multiple aquatic species.
The aim of this collaborative research is to align and combine the Unilever/LJMU findings with those of KREATiS in order to update the MechoA scheme and ultimately make a new enhanced version available in the OECD Toolbox and other platforms.
1Franklin Bauer, Paul Thomas, Samuel Fouchard, Neunlist Serge (2018) High-accuracy prediction of Mechanisms of Action using structural alerts. Computational Toxicology, Volume 7, Pages 36-45
2Maria Sapounidou, David J. Ebbrell, Mark A. Bonnell, Bruno Campos, James W. Firman, Steve Gutsell, Geoff Hodges, Jayne Roberts, and Mark T. D. Cronin Development of an Enhanced Mechanistically Driven Mode of Action Classification Scheme for Adverse Effects on Environmental Spec Environ. Sci. Technol. 2021, 55, 3, 1897–1907