The U.S. National Toxicology Program's Interagency Center for the Evaluation of Alternative Methods and its Interagency Coordinating Committee on the Validation of Alternative Methods recently completed and planned several activities to promote the development, validation and regulatory acceptance of alternative methods for regulatory safety testing. Recommendations for new allergic contact dermatitis test methods were accepted in the U.S. and internationally by the OECD. An international workshop developed recommendations to advance alternative methods for human and veterinary vaccine potency and safety testing. Wokshops on best practices for assessing the eye injury and allergic contact dermatitis potential of chemicals and products were convened to foster the use of accepted new test methods. An upcoming international panel will evaluate the validity of an in vitro estrogen receptor transcriptional activation assay. These activities are expected to improve global animal welfare and reduce animal use while ensuring continued protection of people, animals, and the environment.

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New respiratory sensitization positive/negative prediction models with discriminant functions were generated and parameter analyses were discussed on the basis of QSAR technology. Samples used in this research were selected from the list of European Chemical Bureau (ECB): R42, R42/43 for positive samples (respiratory sensitizers) and from the classification results of the Japanese Inter-ministerial Committee for negative respiratory sensitizers (controls). A total of 214 compounds (61 positive sensitizers and 153 negative sensitizers) were used in this study. Parameters were generated from 2-D and 3-D structures of compound. All of the approximately 800 parameters generated were reduced to 12 parameter set by feature selection. Various linear and non-linear discriminant analysis methods were applied using the parameter set. All data analyses were performed using ADMEWORKS/ ModelBuilder software. Perfect classification ratios (100%) were achieved using Iterative Least Squares (ILS) and AdaBoost. The highest prediction ratio of 97.2% by leave-one-out cross-validation was achieved with Support Vector Machine (SVM). This model is applicable to initial prediction of respiratory sensitization.

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The most important point for considering publication in this journal is the basic design of the manuscript. Especially in this journal are required to promote the 3Rs. There are many manuscripts whose results are inconsistent with the purposes of the study. Furthermore, there are many manuscripts whose study design only follows studies published in another journal. The following section describes common reasons for revising or rejecting manuscripts submitted to the journal.

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