A new free web-based tool, developed by the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH) with EU partners, will advise manufacturers, scientists, and lecturers on internationally accepted methods for safety testing of chemicals and nanomaterials.
The tool is aimed at anyone interested in the test guidelines and guidance documents of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), including companies trying to obtain regulatory approval for their new chemicals and materials.
The OECD works with governments, businesses, and citizens to establish evidence-based international standards and find solutions to a range of social, economic, and environmental challenges. This includes publishing internationally accepted standard methods for the safety testing of chemicals and nanomaterials.
Laboratory tests performed under an approved test guideline and following good laboratory practices are recognised by all OECD member countries for the purposes of safety assessment.
The new tool offers guidance and tips on how to develop or adapt OECD Test Guidelines (TGs) and Guidance Documents (GDs), including when and how to prepare for required activities, key start and finish dates of the development process, and who to involve in which activities and when.
The NanoHarmony OECD TG/GD Process Mentor can be used by researchers who need to understand how their new methods can be taken into the OECD process, by university teachers who can educate their students on how science is used in regulations, or by governments to train the next generation of regulatory scientists. It has training material that provides a low-level entry into the topic of standards and harmonised OECD Test Guidelines, and how science can contribute to this.
Dr Elise Morel of UKCEH, who led the work on the new tool, explains: “The Process Mentor will help people understand how OECD test guidelines are developed and steer them through the process. It will also make the development of future guidelines easier by highlighting the steps that scientists need to take at each phase.”
The Process Mentor tool has been developed by UKCEH scientists and collaborators over the past three years as part of the NanoHarmony project, funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 programme. They have been working towards harmonising test methods for nanomaterials, which are extremely small particles that can provide materials with increased strength, chemical reactivity or conductivity.
The project team, including Dr Morel and Dr Claus Svendsen of UKCEH, also published a White Paper that calls for OECD Member countries to provide long-term, dedicated additional funding to help ensure that guidelines are kept up-to-date and relevant to regulatory requirements, especially for new chemicals and materials.
The paper also encourages universities, professional societies, industry sector bodies and other relevant stakeholders to include test guideline development in their training to help raise awareness of the role and importance they play in society.
The White Paper and training material are available to download for free from the ‘useful resources’ section of the Process Mentor tool at testguideline-development.org