Hypatia will bring about lasting change in the way schools, science museums, research institutions and industry engage teenage girls in STEM across Europe. Bringing these stakeholders together with gender experts and teenagers themselves, Hypatia will develop, pilot and disseminate a unique modular toolkit of activities and guidelines for engaging teenagers in STEM in a gender-inclusive way. These innovative activities, based on existing European good practices, will be implemented in 14 EU countries and further afield, in schools, science museums and by institutions in research and industry, thanks to hubs of stakeholders strengthened through the project. The activities will have a central focus on gender-inclusive ways of communicating STEM, empowering teenage girls and exploring the range of skills that are needed for the great variety of STEM studies and careers open to young people. The Hypatia hubs will provide a sustainable basis for these activities to be carried out on the long term, with a focus on dissemination through networks and stakeholder engagement allowing the project impact to multiply.

The vision of EU-ToxRisk is to drive a paradigm shift in toxicology towards an animal-free, mechanism-based integrated approach to chemical safety assessment. The project will unite all relevant disciplines and stakeholders to establish: i) pragmatic, solid read-across procedures incorporating mechanistic and toxicokinetic knowledge; and ii) ab initio hazard and risk assessment strategies of chemicals with little background information. The project will focus on repeated dose systemic toxicity (liver, kidney, lung and nervous system) as well as developmental/reproduction toxicity. Different human tiered test systems are integrated to balance speed, cost and biological complexity. EU-ToxRisk extensively integrates the adverse outcome pathway (AOP)-based toxicity testing concept. Therefore, advanced technologies, including high throughput transcriptomics, RNA interference, and high throughput microscopy, will provide quantitative and mechanistic underpinning of AOPs and key events (KE). The project combines in silico tools and in vitro assays by computational modelling approaches to provide quantitative data on the activation of KE of AOP. This information, together with detailed toxicokinetics data, and in vitro-in vivo extrapolation algorithms forms the basis for improved hazard and risk assessment. The EU-ToxRisk work plan is structured along a broad spectrum of case studies, driven by the cosmetics, (agro)-chemical, pharma industry together with regulators. The approach involves iterative training, testing, optimization and validation phases to establish fit-for-purpose integrated approaches to testing and assessment with key EU-ToxRisk methodologies. The test systems will be combined to a flexible service package for exploitation and continued impact across industry sectors and regulatory application. The proof-of-concept for the new mechanism-based testing strategy will make EU-ToxRisk the flagship in Europe for animal-free chemical safety assessment.

The vision of the RISK-HUNT3R consortium is to develop a reliable, efficient and cost-effective chemical safety assessment approach. It will be based entirely on non-animal methods and provide improved protection of the human population against systemic health effects caused by (chronic) chemical exposure. The major innovation provided by RISK-HUNT3R is a complete and truly human-centric risk assessment strategy. RISK-HUNT3R will establish, optimize and assemble all essential safety testing elements: exposure assessment, information on chemical distribution in the body, hazard characterization, adverse outcome prediction and determination of actual risk in defined scenarios. RISK-HUNT3R integrates cutting-edge in silico (computational) and in vitro (experimental testing) technologies. Human (disease) genetics and exposome data will ensure anchoring of test results to the human situation. The project will ensure regulatory relevance by testing the applicability of the critical test systems integrated in the next generation risk assessment strategy. The ambitious overall deliverable will be a comprehensive computational framework for the prediction of human adverse outcomes, and a set of stringently evaluated assays to feed the required data into this framework. RISK-HUNT3R will engage with all key stakeholders from different industry sectors and international regulatory agencies to critically evaluate and warrant genuine acceptance of the novel safety testing framework. This unique interaction of these key stakeholders working together on real-world case studies, will result in a ready-to-apply strategy to ensure societal protection against hazardous chemicals fully in concordance with the European Commission’s “Green Deal”. Importantly, the project will push commercial exploitation of the validated safety assessment approaches, thereby ensuring sustainability of the project outcomes and fortifying the innovation capacity of the industry sectors involved.