Highly recommended, if you are interested in the safety assessment for cosmetics or if you are interested in gaining knowledge in how animal-free safety assessment of chemicals can be structured.
I am doing this Master Class even if I am not personally involved in all the phases of the safety assessment of chemicals. As an expert in in silico toxicology, knowing the context and how the data that I generate with QSAR and read-across approaches are used, helps me to generate more useful and more reliable, more "fit-for-purpose" predictions.
And if after this Master Class you have the wish to gain more practical experience in the use of QSAR and read-across for regulatory applications, try our training course on NAMs.
The first three modules were released in March 2023: Module 0 – Overview, Module 1 – Problem Formulation, Module 2 – Consumer Exposure, Module 3 – Predictive Chemistry. Other modules will be released in May and June 2023.
The AFSA Collaboration has developed this master class to build capacity and confidence in animal-free safety assessment of cosmetics and ingredients. This will support the development of new and safer products as well as robust safety decisions. This free course is focused on safety assessment of cosmetics and cosmetic ingredients without new animal data. The 10-part course:
Covers all aspects of the process for internal and regulatory safety assessments
Covers the spectrum of available risk assessment tools as well as some tools in development
Builds understanding about the information generated from the tools and how to use this information
The AFSA Master Class is a free, in-depth, e-learning course designed to support safety assessors and regulators, compliance specialists, SMEs, CROs, NGOs, and other interested stakeholders develop a greater understanding of contemporary non-animal predictive approaches, and increase their confidence in their use to inform regulatory decisions, support safe and sustainable products by design, and aid compliance with mandates restricting animal testing. The course content is based on established scientific principles of “next-generation risk assessment,” an exposure-led, hypothesis-driven risk assessment approach that integrates existing knowledge with in silico, in chemico, and in vitro approaches in a tiered framework to identify situations in which a product or ingredient may be used safely.
The AFSA Master Class consists of 10 modules corresponding to discrete steps in the risk assessment process (problem formulation, consumer exposure, predictive chemistry, exposure-based waiving, history of safe use, in vitro assay synthesis, internal exposure, and integration into risk assessment), together with overview modules on the NGRA framework and the global regulatory environment for cosmetics.
The course content is based on the principles of next-generation risk assessment and was built by more than 50 experts from AFSA Collaboration members Avon Products Inc., Crème Global, Delphic HSE, Firmenich, Givaudan, Humane Society International, IFF, Institute for In Vitro Sciences, Lhasa Ltd., L’Oréal, Lush, Procter & Gamble, Symrise, and Unilever.
The EU was hailed as the world’s largest cruelty-free beauty market in 2013 when the final phase of its step-wise bans on cosmetics animal testing and sales entered into force. However, since 2020, the European Chemicals Agency has begun requesting new animal tests for cosmetic ingredients under the EU chemicals legislation “REACH” in spite of the ban under the cosmetic products regulation.