Unilever is a global Consumer Goods company which makes many well-known brands across our Foods & Refreshment, Beauty & Personal Care and Homecare Divisions. At Unilever, our Safety and Environmental Assurance Centre (SEAC) is a team of over 160 safety and environmental sustainability scientists based in Bedfordshire in the UK. We use the latest techniques, deep scientific expertise and an evidence-based approach to ensure that Unilever products are safe for consumers and workers and better for the environment. To assure that our products are safe for our consumers and the workers that make them, we use a tiered and exposure-driven approach to all our human health safety assessments. We use a wide range of non-animal approaches to assess the safety of our products. This talk will demonstrate the non-animal approaches we use in our safety assessments concentrating on some of the newer techniques we have developed and are applying in Next Generation Risk Assessment (NGRA). NGRA provides a way to integrate New Approach Methodology (NAM) data from various sources into the safety decision-making process, allowing for safety assessments to be conducted without the use of animal data. Recently, the Internal Cooperation for Cosmetics Regulation (ICCR) outlined nine principles for the use of NGRA to make decisions on consumer safety of ingredients in cosmetics products . These principles have been incorporated into the most recent update of the EC's SCSS Notes of Guidance for the Testing of Cosmetic Ingredients and their Safety Evaluation and used by Unilever in several published case studies in the areas of systemic toxicity and skin allergy.
Dr Carl Westmoreland works for Unilever and is based in the Safety and Environmental Assurance Centre (SEAC) in the UK. He is the Director of Science & Technology where a large part of his role focuses on the strategic development and application of the science needed for non-animal, risk-based safety assessments. Previously, he received his PhD from the University of Surrey and worked for 10 years at GlaxoSmithKline. Carl represents Unilever on a number of external groups including EPAA, ECETOC and Cefic and has previously served on many scientific groups including the EURL-ECVAM Scientific Advisory Committee and UK NC3Rs. He is a Fellow of the British Toxicology Society.