The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN), and Molecular Networks are collaborating on a food additives knowledge base. The three-year research collaboration agreement (RCA) will create the Office of Food Safety's food additives knowledge base CERES using Molecular Networks' chemoinformatics platform Moses.
The Chemical Evaluation and Risk Estimation System (CERES) is a centralised, chemical structure- oriented knowledge base, which will establish a sustainable data/information management and storage system to provide decision support for both pre-market and post-market safety assessments for food ingredients and food-contact substances. Included in CERES is the development of structural alerts, computational toxicology and metabolism prediction models, and threshold of toxicological concern approach to food ingredients.
