An ad hoc committee under the auspices of the National Research Council will consider how the Department of Defense (DOD) could use modern approaches for predicting chemical toxicity in its efforts to prevent debilitating acute exposures to deployed personnel.

DOD needs to understand the relative threat of the increasingly long list of registered chemical substances, particularly in terms of potential acute hazard. To help DOD achieve its goal to protect its deployed personnel, this study will consider modern approaches for predicting toxicity and suggest an overall conceptual approach for using such information to evaluate acute hazards. The committee will consider the information provided by predictive-toxicology approaches that is increasingly being generated and used in the environmental health and pharmaceutical sectors to enhance or replace information from traditional, empirical testing of chemical safety in animals. The committee will focus on the assays and approaches that are being developed by the United States and European agencies (for example, for the Registration, Evaluation, Authorization, and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) program, the EPA ToxCast effort, and the NIH/EPA/FDA Tox21 program); these might include computational modeling, structure-activity relationship analysis, analysis of physicochemical characteristics, read-across techniques, and high-throughput screening and other in vitro assays. Specifically, the committee will discuss the ability of these approaches to predict acute toxicity at levels relevant to DOD concerns.
In Phase 1 of this study, the committee will comment on the robustness and the relevance of the current approaches to meet DOD's needs. If the approaches being developed by other agencies do not address DOD’s concerns about acute toxicity, the committee will broadly describe areas of research that could fill the gaps within the next 5 or 10 years. A second phase of the study, undertaken at the sponsor's request, will provide more detailed recommendations for a research roadmap.