Page 6 - Signals

4
FOOD SAFETY COMMITTEES
• The Committee is collaborating with the America Spice Trade Association (ASTA) through an unrestricted grant on a program of work for the advancement of food safety in spices. The two research projects, composed of investigators at Virginia Tech and Texas A&M, are collaborating to establish protocols for validation of spice mitigation treatments and the identi cation of appropriate surrogate organ- isms for Salmonella in ethylene oxide (ETO), dry steam, and irradiation. The studies will be completed in 2016. A further degree of food safety assurance should be achieved from the results of these studies.
This Committee is the only ILSI North America scienti c committee that awards competitive research grants. These grants often lead to further research support. For example,
an investment of $118,750 by the Committee for the project, “Improved Process Validation Strategies for Salmonella Inactivation on Low-Moisture Food Products Subjected to Thermal Pasteurization Processes,” led to the researcher receiving two National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) grants totaling $1.04 million from 2012 to 2015. Continuing to build off of the original Committee-funded project, the researcher is now the PI on a multi-institutional US Department
of Agriculture Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) grant of $4.7 million over 5 years.
Technical Committee
on Food and Chemical Safety
The Technical Committee on Food
and Chemical Safety promotes a science-based determination of the chemical safety of foods to support the advancement of public health.
The Committee continues to invest in the training and education of future scientists by sponsoring a summer fellowship related to an emerging issue
in the scienti c eld. The 2014 summer fellowship work on low dose expo- sure was presented during a poster session at Society of Toxicology (SOT) 2015 Annual Meeting. Also, a poster on 2013 summer fellowship work on chemical mixtures was presented at SOT, IAFP, and Eurotox 2015 meetings.
The Committee hosted a weight-of- evidence workshop in May 2015 on the “Risk-Based Process for Mitigation of Process-Formed Compounds” to gain alignment on a scienti c process to evaluate the impact of mitigation. The outcome of the workshop was a decision tree that can be used by the scienti c community and has potential of being adopted as a global regula- tory tool for evaluating the impact on risk caused by process-formed com- pounds. The workshop proceedings will be published in early 2016.
In the eld of high-throughput screening (HTS) technologies, the Committee continues to advance the science through its projects that put into context the results of HTS. To strengthen the communication around the key messages from the May work- shop, a Risk Bite video on Tox21 was developed.
As part of the Committee’s work on HTS, a project on classifying and characterizing food-related ToxCast II chemicals is nearing completion. This work will be published in a peer- reviewed journal. To better under- stand and compare the applicability of traditional toxicology studies and data sets generated by in silico and HTS technologies in the safety assessment of chemicals, the 2016 summer fellow- ship project will focus on a case study for an indirect food additive from the ToxCast II library utilizing the ILSI HESI Risk21 approach.
Two research studies on arsenic, one related to long-term exposure in the US population and the other on mech- anisms of action, have been funded by the Committee. The ndings from these research projects will be pub- lished in 2016.
www.ilsina.org