The Pistoia Alliance is aiming to improve laboratory safety with the launch of a new Chemical Safety Library (CSL) Service - a collaborative database of hazardous reaction incident data, which allows hazardous reaction information to be captured, stored and shared.
‘Laboratory and personal safety during R&D is paramount. Many commercial and open resources exist that detail hazardous properties of individual reagents. However, we often lack real-life guidance regarding the combining and reacting of such reagents. This is because critical safety incident details typically are stored in internal silos, are undiscoverable, and are not shared between scientists,’ commented Steve Arlington, president of The Pistoia Alliance.
The CSL Service includes a collaborative database containing an initial set of hazardous reaction incidents compiled by The Pistoia Alliance CSL Service project team, and a simple submission tool to collect further entries. The service is open to the community at large, to grow the reaction incident data set and to share the collected data.
Safety incidents are relatively common in laboratories, but many incidents while reported internally are not public knowledge so similar incidents can happen again in another organisation. The CSL service hopes to reduce this as the dataset can be downloaded and integrated into companies’ proprietary systems and configured to alert scientists if there is a potential known safety risk before they carry out an experiment.
'With the launch of the CSL Service, we are addressing this long-standing issue with a simple, easy to use solution. We now encourage the laboratory community to get involved, and to add their own data to the CSL Service – it takes just a couple of minutes and could prevent the repeat of dangerous events' concluded Arlington.
In February 2017 the BBC reported that a highly explosive substance was created – by accident – at the University of Bristol, UK during a routine procedure.
The Pistoia Alliance is a not for profit organisation that was created to address the barriers and challenges that companies face during Life Sciences research and development. Further details on the CSL Service will be presented on the 4th of April, at the Spring 2017 American Chemical Society Meeting in San Francisco, in the Chemical Health and Safety division symposium.
