The Toolbox is a software application intended to the use of governments, chemical industry and other stakeholders in filling gaps in (eco)toxicity data needed for assessing the hazards of chemicals. It has been developed in close collaboration with the European Chemicals Agency. The Toolbox incorporates information and tools from various sources into a logical workflow. Crucial to this workflow is grouping chemicals into chemical categories.
Please consult www.qsartoolbox.org.
The seminal features of the Toolbox are:
- Identification of relevant structural characteristics and potential mechanism or mode of action of a target chemical.
- Identification of other chemicals that have the same structural characteristics and/or mechanism or mode of action.
- Use of existing experimental data to fill the data gap(s).
The Toolbox has benefitted from the contributions of numerous experts in governments, NGOs and the chemical industry. The software was developed by the Laboratory of Mathematical Chemistry.
The toolbox also provides an approach to predict skin sensitisation based on the concept of Adverse Outcome Pathways. The Toolbox has been developed in several phases:
- to emphasise technological proof-of-concept (version 1.0 released in 2008);
- to develop a more comprehensive Toolbox which fully implements the capabilities of the first version launched in 2008 (version 2.0 released in 2010, version 3.0 released in 2012);
- 3rd Toolbox generation, containing new features launched in 2012.
- version 4.0 was released in April 2017.
- version 4.1 was released in August 2017.
- version 4.2 was released in February 2018.
- version 4.3 was released in February 2019.
- version 4.4 was released in February 2020.
- version 4.5 was released in September 2021.
- version 4.6 was released in May 2023.
- version 4.7 was released in July 2024.
