NAMs and Next Generation Risk Assessment for Food Safety

Danilo Basili is a Senior Specialist Computational Toxicologist at Nestlè Research in Lausanne, Switzerland. Before joining Nestlè in June 2023, he was a computational toxicologist at the Unilever Safety and Environmental Assurance Centre (SEAC) where he contributed to the development and refinement of Next generation Risk Assessment (NGRA) frameworks in the area of systemic, developmental and inhalation toxicity all sharing the common goal of assessing the safety of Unilever products for both human health and the environment.

Sylvia Escher is a Chemist and trained Toxicologist and the Head of the Department of In-silico Toxicology at the Fraunhofer Institute for Toxicology and Experimental Medicine (ITEM). The focus of her work the use of alternative methods such as QSAR models and grouping approaches in safety and risk assessment. This include the development and maintenance of toxicological databases. For some years now, the integration of new methods in human risk assessment, such as those developed in the EUTOXRISK and EXITOX project, has increasingly become the focus of their work. In this context ITEM is developing workflows to integrate omic data as well as PBK models, specialized on uptake and distribution of airborne compounds.

Paul Hepburn currently works at the Safety & Environmental Assurance Centre (SEAC) of Unilever where he is the Food Safety Lead for Unilever’s global Nutrition and Ice Cream business. Paul has over 25 years experience in the safety assessment of food and cosmetic products. He received his PhD in 1990 in Experimental Cancer Chemotherapy from the Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences at Aston University in Birmingham, UK, and is on the European Register of Toxicologists. He is a strong advocate for the application of scientific risk-based approaches to food safety, in particular the application of strategies that avoid the use of animals and leads the FoodDrinkEurope Expert group on New Approach Methodologies (NAMs). He has published numerous papers on the safety assessment of novel foods, post launch monitoring and food toxicology.

Catherine Mahony is a Research Fellow Corporate Safety at Procter & Gamble in UK with more than 25 years of Product Safety experience in the consumer product industry. Within that role, she is responsible for providing scientific leadership for assessments aimed at characterising the safety of ingredients and new products. She is the author or co-author on a number of publications and is a member of both the UK register of Toxicologists and the European Register of Toxicologists. She is also a member of the British Toxicology Society.

Maricel Marin-Kuan is In Vitro Toxicology Specialist within the Nestlé Institute of Food Safety & Analytical Sciences at Nestlé Research in Lausanne-Switzerland. Maricel has been working at Nestlé since 2002, with key scientific contributions in the safety-by-design area bringing in vitro solutions to food quality and safety challenges for prioritization and decision-making. Involved in the packaging safety area since 2010 with the application of multidisciplinary tools to assess the safety of new packaging material using qualified in vitro tools. External collaborations with academia and industry on various food safety issues.

Gina Montoya is an European Recognized Toxicologist. She currently serves as Leader for the Chemical Risk Assessment Group at Nestlé Research in Switzerland and is board member of the Swiss Society of Toxicology (SST). With a PhD in Molecular Nutrition and Toxicology from the University of Kaiserslautern and a background that spans Mead Johnson Nutrition, Monsanto BASF and Danone Research Institute, Gina’s international experience has solidified her as a key contributor in the field. Born in Bogotá, Colombia, and specialized in clinical nutrition, she brings a global perspective to the world of human toxicology and nutrition.

James F. Rathman has been a Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the Ohio State University since 1991 and the Managing Director and Co-founder of Altamira (MN-AM) in Columbus since 2008. He has also been a member of the ONTOX consortium since 2021.

Elena Reale is a Chemist and Toxicologist, with a PhD in Life Sciences. She is a specialist in in vitro testing methods, namely skin absorption, and in silico physiologically based kinetic (PBK) models. Elena has previously worked at the Occupational Health and Environment department at the Center for Primary Care and Public Health (Unisanté - University of Lausanne). In 2023 she has joined Nestlé Research in Lausanne as a Specialist in New Approach Methodologies, where she contributes to integrating NAMS into risk assessment.

Dieter Schrenk has been a Professor for Food Chemistry and Environmental Toxicology at the University of Kaiserslautern-Landau since 1996. In 2005 he took on the full professorship for Food Chemistry and Toxicology. He joined the EFSA CONTAM Panel in 2003. Since 2018 he has been the Chair of this panel.

Imran Shah is a computational systems biologist in the U.S. EPA’s National Center for Computational Toxicology (NCCT). He provides NCCT leadership in innovative computational approaches to rapidly evaluate health implications for thousands of environmental stressors. His research focuses on predicting chemical-induced toxicity from complex large-scale molecular data sets using novel machine learning and systems biology methods.

Martin Wilks is a Medical Toxicologist and risk assessment expert with more than 30 years of experience in academia, industry and the health service. He is Adjunct Professor of Toxicology at the University of Basel and was until January 2024 Director of the Swiss Centre for Applied Human Toxicology (SCAHT). He is a EUROTOX Registered Toxicologist, Secretary-General of EUROTOX and President-elect of the International Union of Toxicology (IUTOX).