illuminaries...turning data into information

Syngenta

S.A.B.R.E.

In 2003, senior toxicologists from one of Illuminaries’ long-standing clients, Syngenta Ltd, began work as members of an international task force, looking for improved ways of performing chemical product safety testing. A key task assigned to the Syngenta scientists was the development of a database that would allow the ILSI (International Life Sciences Institute) Task Force members retrospectively to analyse the safety testing outcome for a wide range of chemicals that are currently available in markets throughout the world.

Syngenta called on the expertise of Illuminaries to help them put the finishing touches to the database which was subsequently dubbed SABRE (Safety Assessment By Refined Experimentation). For the past two years, SABRE has been used extensively by the Task Force to help develop new principles for safety testing and risk assessment based on analysis of the hazard data relating to just 64 sample chemicals.

The positive value of the Task Force’s efforts has now been recognised by the USEPA (US Environmental Protection Agency) and, at the specific request of that most prominent organisation, Syngenta has agreed to make a gift of the SABRE database to the USEPA so that evaluation of the potential benefits of the new principles can be extended by the analysis of additional chemicals using data drawn from that organisation’s extensive chemical hazard data banks.

As one of the Syngenta Task Force members remarked, “The sort of data and analyses that SABRE delivers is quite different from the type of IT solution that Illuminaries normally supply to Syngenta, yet they came up trumps to help us deliver this database to the Task Force, the outcome of whose endeavours we feel will provide a most significant improvement in the approach our industry takes in the safety assessment of its products”.