OUR VISION Imagine a world in which we perform precision safety testing of chemicals and pharmaceuticals without using laboratory animals. Imagine that the safety of chemicals and pharmaceuticals can be assessed for vulnerable groups such as infants, the elderly or the diseased. Imagine that we know how these substances interact with human biology and physiology and how they can be used safely at home, school or at work during the course of our lives. This is our vision for the future, the vision that underlies the development of the Virtual Human Platform for Safety Assessment, VHP4Safety. OUR MISSION Towards safety assessment based on human data Our mission is to improve the prediction of the potential harmful effects of chemicals and pharmaceuticals based on a holistic, interdisciplinary definition of human health by developing the Virtual Human Platform and accelerating the transition from animal-based testing to innovative safety assessment. The Virtual Human Platform integrates data on human physiology, chemical characteristics and perturbations of biological pathways, for the first time in an inclusive and integrated manner that incorporates: 1) human-relevant scenarios to discriminate vulnerable groups (such as disease state, life course exposure, gender and age); 2) chemicals from different sectors (pharma, consumer products and chemical industry); and, 3) different regulatory and stakeholder needs. The Virtual Human Platform addresses the emerging societal challenge of the transition to animal-free safety assessment, by integrating various scientific disciplines in the consortium and working with all stakeholders towards implementation and societal acceptance of an approach to chemical safety assessment that is based on human data rather than animal data.
