Spanning regulatory silos in the U.S. EPA's Endocrine Disruptor Screening Program

摘要

In their recent discussion paper ('Should the scope of human mixture risk assessment span legislative/regulatory silos for chemicals?'), Evans et al. raise important questions around the need for risk assessments that cut across regulatory silos in evaluating the cumulative risk of diverse chemicals with shared biological targets across all exposure routes (Evans et al., 2015). The U.S. EPA's Endocrine Disruptor Screening Program (EDSP) is validating novel high throughput and computational models (EPA, 2015) that could facilitate evaluation of cumulative risk of multiple chemicals across multiple exposure pathways (NAS, 2009). High Throughput Screening (HTS) data generated for the EDSP provide a consistent scientific platform for pathway-based evaluation of diverse chemicals, creating a natural point of confluence for evaluation of chemicals from distinct regulatory silos. For example, data currently available through the EDSP (EPA, 2015) could be used to estimate cumulative bioactivity in the estrogen receptor pathway.