Strategic Design of Alternative Methods to Reduce Animal Testing

The International QSAR Foundation is spearheading a special effort to compile high-quality databases from the literature for use in QSAR modeling. Most organizations are aware of very large or even immense databases, and the prospects for even larger databases from high-throughput technology grow every year. Compiling another high-quality database may not sound like a unique or particularly useful activity; however, if useful at all in modeling, only a very small fraction of these data found in huge databases is useful in understanding why a chemical behaved the way it did in a particular test.  Too often, the data are simply recorded phenomena that reflect little about the exposure variables influencing the phenomenon.

The lack of mechanistic QSAR models for most hazard assessment endpoints is testimony to the non-systematic nature of large databases. In cases where tests measuring thermodynamic variation are mixed with those measuring kinetic variation, the scant useful information is lost unless the experimenter was careful to record such measurements and the data compilations accurately reflect that record.

All data and models are distributed to our partners and on the internet. Priorities include data for inhalation toxicity, sensory irritation, glutathione reactivity, and butylamine reactivity.

Information about databases donated to IQF or developed in collaboration with IQF partners will be available soon.