Figures of the Workshop

The SCARLET Workshop on in silico methods for carcinogenicity and mutagenicity took place at the Mario Negri Institute in Milan (Italy), from April 2, 2008 in the afternoon to April 4, 2008 in the morning, gathering 52 participants (including speakers, poster presenters, chairmen, representatives of the SCARLET consortium and external participants) from 11 countries. For more details about participants click here.

Grants for expenses reimbursement were available for young researchers (less than 35 years old, from EU, Associated Candidate Countries, New Member States and developing countries) to cover travel costs and to waive registration fees: the Organizing and Steering Committee assigned these grants to 4 researchers coming from France, United Kingdom and the Netherlands. A fifth grant had to be assigned to a researcher from the People's Republic of China, who had to renounce to take part in the workshop few days before the event. Due to limitation of time there was no replacement.

16 oral contributions were presented by speakers, and 11 posters were displayed (one additional poster had to be shown by the aforementioned Chinese researcher who renounced to participate): the abstracts of all oral contributions and posters are available in the programme section of this website and were provided to all participants through a specific brochure.

Workshop programme

As from the programme, oral presentations were scheduled on 4 main sessions, corresponding to different areas of analysis and discussion, to assess the utility of the in silico tools for the different scenarios:

1. the scientific framework of the carcinogenicity and mutagenicity studies;
2. the needs of industry and regulators;
3. the state-of-the-art of the methods of in silico prediction for carcinogenicity and mutagenicity;
4. connecting new and traditional data into a new scenario.

For each session a chairman was identified among the members of the Advisory Committee of the project. See the programme section for more details.

Focal themes of the scientific discussion

Participants discussed the potentialities and the problems of the methods, but also the society and industry needs and the possibilities of interactions with a wider scientific scenario of the research dealing with carcinogenicity and toxicity in general. For a complete report click here.

The studies on carcinogenicity and mutagenicity cover a series of fields such as biology, toxicology, biochemistry. These studies are important not only on a scientific point of view, but also for the consequences related to the toxicity of carcinogenic and mutagenic compounds. To explore the different perspectives different tools may be preferable. In silico tools are those based on computer programs; they include the so called (quantitative) structure-activity relationships: (Q)SAR.

In Silico tools may offer advantages for several opportunities and for this reason it may be useful to have a general overview of the evolving field of carcinogenicity and mutagenicity studies.

The aim of the EU funded project SCARLET was to organise a workshop on in silico methods for carcinogenicity and mutagenicity.

QSARs (Quantitative Structure Activity Relationships) for genotoxicity and carcinogenicity are gaining increasing importance for the risk assessment of chemicals. This workshop brought together leading experts in this area to discuss: