UNC toxicologists present NexGen tools to Canada’s national health agency
| July 09, 2013 | |
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Members of the Gillings School of Global Public Health’s Carolina Center for Computational Toxicology conducted a workshop at Health Canada, in Ottawa on June 25, to introduce public health workers to computational toxicology tools for Next Generation (NexGen) environmental risk assessment.Health Canada, similar to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, is the federal agency responsible for helping Canadians maintain and improve their health.
NexGen is a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency program that aims to develop a cheaper, faster and more robust system for chemical risk assessment by incorporating new knowledge about molecular system biology.
Dr. Ivan Rusyn
Dr. Fred Wright
Workshop leaders were Ivan Rusyn, MD, PhD, professor of environmental sciences and engineering and director of the toxicology center; Fred Wright, PhD, professor of biostatistics; and Alexander Tropsha, PhD, K.H. Lee Distinguished Professor in the UNC School of Pharmacy. “This was an informative experience for all of us,” Rusyn said. “The real-world perspective that practitioners provide is always extremely useful to us as we refine our current work and develop new ideas.””We greatly appreciate the excellent presentations and interactive sessions on the developing tools,” said Tara Barton-Maclaren, PhD, manager of the Hazard Methodology Division within Health Canada’s Healthy Environments and Consumer Safety Branch. “We will have follow-up discussions here to investigate areas where these platforms may facilitate and support our work under [Canada’s] Chemicals Management Plan.”
Gillings School of Global Public Health contact: David Pesci, director of communications, (919) 962-2600 or dpesci@unc.edu.
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