Evaluation of a New In Chemico Skin Corrosion Test

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to evaluate a novel macromolecular test method for the identification of dermal corrosives. The simple in chemico test procedure involves allowing the material to be tested to interact with a skin biomarker for corrosivity and then adding a detection reagent. The corrosivity of the test substance is predicted based on the measured macromolecular damage, which results in reduced optical density of the detection reagent as compared with controls. This study aims to determine if such an extremely simple, cell-free test method can accurately identify dermal corrosives. To determine predictivity and repeatability, we tested 60 chemicals (30 in vivo dermal corrosives and 30 in vivo dermal noncorrosives; all tested in triplicate) representative of a broad range of chemical classes, functional groups, mixtures, and levels of toxicity. Validation results indicate the GHS multicategory and packing group assignment accuracy is on par with that of the Reconstructed Human Epidermis test method and the Membrane Barrier test method and for the global identification of corrosives, the method has a considerably higher accuracy (98 % vs. ∼80 %).