Pharmacokinetics and expert systems as aids for risk assessment in reproductive toxicology.

A minimal approach to risk assessment in reproductive toxicology involves four components: hazard identification, hazard characterization, exposure characterization, and risk characterization. In practice, risk assessment in reproductive toxicology has been reduced to arbitrary safety factors or mathematical models of the dose-response relationship. These approaches obscure biological differences across species rather than using this important and frequently accessible information. Two approaches that are formally capable of using biologically relevant information (pharmacokinetics and expert system shells) are explored as aids to risk assessment in reproductive toxicology.