NAMs offer means for UK lead in chemical testing, say Government advisors

DEFRA’s Hazardous Substances Advisory Committee (HSAC) says the use of NAMs –new approach methodologies – would enable the UK to pioneer ethical, sustainable safer, and cost-effective chemical testing.

The body’s recommendations are outlined in a new report with input from committee members, plus the University of Birmingham and King’s College London.

Calling for early adoption of a risk-based approach to regulation the authors state that the country’s capabilities in public health and safety are sufficiently advanced to allow the country to develop as a global leader in using NAMs for chemical safety assessments.

HSAC chair Iseult Lynch, professor of environmental nanosciences at Birmingham, said the time was right for the UK to begin the transition to NAMs-based regulation.

NAMs’ use of advanced technologies promises possible improvements to the relevance, performance, speed and reliability of toxicological testing and so could enhance assessment and regulation of hazardous chemicals.

Lynch warned that current approaches have “not kept pace with the advances in science that are providing new insights into the toxicology of substances and their mixtures for assessing health risks to humans and the environment”.

NAMs adoption also offers an ethical benefit, say the report authors, with potential to transition from the animal testing on which many current approaches to chemicals regulation rely.

HSAC member and senior lecturer in mechanistic and integrative toxicology at King’s College London Dr. Luigi Margiotta-Casaluci commented:

“These new approaches are increasingly contributing to safety decision-making across different sectors while reducing the need for animal testing where alternative methods are viable.”

However successful adoption and integration of NAMs into the current system would require the introduction of a progressive regulatory framework.

John Colbourne, professor of environmental genomics at the University of Birmingham and Director of the Centre for Environmental Research and Justice (CERJ) suggested that access to continental funds together with new domestic law could bolster efforts to develop the report’s recommendations.

 “The UK is in a position to harvest from the investments of almost a billion pounds from national and European funded research by revisiting what types of evidence are needed to provide greater protection from toxic chemicals, which can now be part of current legal reforms in the UK, post-Brexit,” he commented.

Main recommendations of the report include:

• Adoption of a technology-agnostic definition of NAMs based on an understanding of chemical modes of action
• Setting of criteria for NAMs to be considered within a progressive regulatory framework
• Extended use of NAMs for regulatory applications as hazard assessment certainty increases
• Establishment of centres of excellence and a national reference laboratory for the development and validation of NAMs
• Incentivisation of chemical registrants under UK REACH to provide NAMs data 

Pic: Rospen Industries