Contact persons for Italy:
Chiara Laura Battistelli, Cecilia Bossa e Olga Tcheremenskaia, Istituto Superiore di Sanità, Dipartimento di Ambiente e Salute
The OECD QSAR Toolbox is a stand-alone free software application developed by Laboratory of Mathematical Chemistry (LMC, Burgas, Bulgaria) under the coordination of OECD and ECHA (www.qsartoolbox.org). It was thought with the purpose of facilitating practical application of the quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) approaches within regulatory frameworks, in order to be used by the governments, the chemical industry, and the toxicologists to fill gaps in toxicity data needed for assessing the hazards posed by chemicals. The QSAR Toolbox minimize the use of (eco) toxicological tests on animals, without compromising the safety of human health and the environment.
The Toolbox incorporates information and tools from many different sources, such as toxicological databases, expert rulebases, QSAR models, chemoinformatic and statistical tools, giving rise to a very powerful and comprehensive instrument, one of a kind in the public domain. The flexibility of the tool allows for exploiting different levels of application, depending on the final purpose and on the experience of the user.
The key functionalities are the characterization of structural and chemical-physical parameters of a substance; the research and extraction of experimental data of one or more substances of interest; the identification of analogues and categories; the simulation of the metabolism; the prediction of (eco) toxicological properties based on QSAR models or “Grouping” and “Read Across” approaches.
The QSAR Toolbox is owned by OECD and ECHA, which together with LMC (the developer) form the coordination group “QSAR Toolbox Coordination”. The OECD "QSAR Toolbox Management Group" was established, which includes OECD member and partner countries and stakeholders within the Working Party on Hazard Assessment (WPHA), and is convened to discuss, approve and test software developments.
For more information, please visit:
https://www.oecd.org/chemicalsafety/risk-assessment/oecd-qsar-toolbox.htm
