Richard Currie

Richard Currie is a Syngenta Senior Fellow in Global Product Safety’s Science Strategy function, based at the Jealotts Hill International Research Centre (Bracknell, UK). He champions the use of mechanistic toxicology and modern approaches to risk assessment. His research interests are in the development and application of modern approaches such as SAR, mechanism of toxicity (including MOA/AOPs), multi-omics methods & interpretation, and in vitro assays and quantitative systems models for toxicology, ecotoxicology and environmental fate. He is a leader for the identification, development, and deployment of new approaches that enhance the capabilities of our research teams to invent new safe and sustainable crop protection active ingredients. Through his consultancy and advocacy internally and externally, via his work with others, he illustrates the potential for modern approaches to be applied in risk assessment problems now and in the future.

NextGen Basel 1

Challenges and opportunities for the use of modern approaches in pesticide design and risk assessment

In this presentation, I will present and discuss some of the challenges and opportunities for the application of innovations in human and environmental safety assessment that can be used to design safe and sustainable crop protection active ingredients (AI). I will show how the use of mechanistic insights, qSAR modelling, and mechanistic mathematical models can be used to identify AI candidates that are low risk. I will then illustrate how multi-omics data can supplement in vivo studies and predict regulatory study outcomes to derisk development candidate selection. Finally, I will highlight our external collaborative regulatory science research on the use of multiple lines of evidence as part of a weight of evidence to meet the risk assessment needs of regulatory agencies.