Industries across a broad spectrum of sectors are now generating increasing numbers of innovative and novel compounds and products, which have the potential to bring enormous benefits to society. Many of these novel compounds will become incorporated into products that will bring continued economic growth and improve global living standards. However, the safe introduction and release of these new materials into the world requires safety assessment prior to their use. At the moment, many of the methods employed to do this were developed in the middle of the last century, and rely heavily on the use of animals. It has become increasingly clear that these methods have limitations, including their speed, scale of use, accuracy and predictivity of various outcomes and relevance to the human context. There is now a concerted global effort to develop novel non-animal methods that will more quickly and accurately predict the safety of novel compounds being produced. The work described in this project will evaluate the potential of a novel method developed in the UK using genomic technology to be used in the assessment of novel materials.