The development and application of statistical methods to establishing methogologies of predicting the hazards of chemical substances

2020 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 16K21674
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (B)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Research Field: Environmental policy and social systems; Environmental impact assessment
• Research Institution: National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology
• Principal Investigator: Takeshita Jun-ichi 国立研究開発法人産業技術総合研究所, エネルギー・環境領域, 主任研究員 (60574390)
• Project Period (FY): 2016-04-01 – 2021-03-31
• Keywords: 化学物質リスク評価 / 有害性推論 / QSAR / Read-across / 統計的測定精度評価 / 質的尺度 / ISO/TC 69（統計的方法の適用）

Outline of Final Research Achievements

To assess and manage chemical substances, experiments are often done on animals. However, in terms of time and cost efficiencies and the need for animal protection, there is increasing global demand to use statistical methods to reduce the need for animal testing. Thus, we mainly developed the following two kinds of methodologies. (1) We proposed methods to predict chemical toxicities based on informatics features, such as physicochemical properties of compounds, and biological features obtained from non-animal experiments. (2) We proposed statistical methods to evaluate the measurement accuracy of binary (e.g., presence/absence of toxicity) and ordinal data (e.g., strength of toxicity, weak/middle/strong), in order to quantify the uncertainty of new non-animal experiments.

Free Research Field

数理科学

Academic Significance and Societal Importance of the Research Achievements

本研究課題で得られた成果はいずれも，リスク評価の際の国際的な動物実験数削減に寄与するものである．特に(1)の成果のひとつであるRead-acrossに関するものは，ケーススタディを除いて既存研究が少なく，統計的手法を提案できたことは学術的意義がある．また(2)に関して2値尺度の統計的測定精度評価手法については食品や分析化学など統計や数学以外の分野でも関心が高いため，2値尺度に関するISOガイダンス文章を発行できたことは社会的意義がある．