USE OF (Q)SAR TOOLS AS A FIRST STEP IN A STRATEGY TO ASSIGN PRIORITY TO SUBSTANCES MIGRATING FROM PRINTED PAPER AND BOARD FOOD CONTACT MATERIALS BASED ON GENOTOXIC POTENTIAL

In the last decade, several incidents with contaminants leaking from food packaging into food and drinks have raised concerns towards potential adverse health effects caused by exposure to these chemicals (e.g. bisphenol A). In 2011, the European Commission adopted a new regulation on the use of chemicals in plastics intended to come into contact with food. However, to this day, no EU regulation exists on chemicals used in other types of food contact materials (FCM). Consequently, non-plastic FCM are only covered by national legislation or by the general recommendations of the Council of Europe, containing ‘inventory lists’ of additives, monomers, solvents and other compounds that might be present in non-plastic FCM. Since no (recent) safety evaluation has been carried out for over 5000 substances present in these inventory lists, identification of substances requiring further safety data is urgently needed. The current study aims to develop a strategy to assign priority to substances used in printed paper and board. First, information on substances present in the inventory lists of the Council of Europe or from national legislation was assembled in a database. In a second step, their genotoxic potential was evaluated in silico using multiple (Q)SAR models (Toxtree, Derek NexusTM, VEGA Consensus model). An applicability domain assessment was performed to ensure fitting of the test compounds in the models applied. Based on the outcome of the in silico evaluation, substances containing a structural alert for genotoxicity were selected for further more in depth study, combining extensive literature review with in vitro genotoxicity testing.