In an article published on May 20, 2022, in the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology, Philippe Ciffroy from the Laboratoire National d’Hydraulique et Environnement, Chatou, France, and co-authors evaluated the global performance of a new tool to model chemical migration from a food contact material (FCM) into food. The model performed well during testing and the authors explain the role it can have assisting with product safety evaluations. Ciffroy et al. combined a simple mechanistic model that describes the transfer of chemicals from a plastic monolayer into food with quantitative property-property relationships (QPPRs). QPPRs allow for predicting the diffusion of chemicals in the FCM and the partitioning at the interface of the FCM and the food.
To evaluate the tool’s performance, the scientists plotted the modeled chemical concentrations against corresponding experimental migration values into food reported in the literature. They found “a good match obtained between predicted and experimental values, with a majority of predicted values not differing from experimental values by more than one order of magnitude.”
Since in a regulatory framework models need to be systematically conservative, which the researchers stated was not the case for their models, they further integrated an uncertainty analysis in the QPPR predictions. Here they found “that the third quartile (75th percentile) derived from probabilistic calculations can be used as a conservative value in the prediction of chemical concentration in food, with reasonable safety factors.”
The authors concluded that their presented migration model is suitable for regulatory application. Especially as a tool to predict whether toxicological analyses are necessary and if so, which type, and amount of toxicological data are needed to evaluate the safety of the FCM substance. The models outlined in the paper include a user manual and are freely available (here or here).
A background article by the Food Packaging Forum on migration modeling explains factors influencing migration and provides an overview of the different approaches to mathematically modeling the migration of chemicals (FPF reported).
Reference
Ciffroy, P. et al. (2022). “Modeling the migration of chemicals from food contact materials to food: The MERLIN-expo/SPHERA toolbox.” Food and Chemical Toxicology. DOI: 10.1016/j.fct.2022.113118.
