Sec. 20214. Supercomputing For Safer Chemicals (SUPERSAFE) Consortium
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The Secretary of Health and Human Services (referred to in this section as the Secretary ), through the Director of the National Toxicology Program, and in collaboration with the heads of any other relevant Federal agencies (including the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Secretary of Energy), shall form a consortium, to be known as the Supercomputing for Safer Chemicals (SUPERSAFE) Consortium (referred to in this section as the Consortium ) with the National Laboratories of the Department of Energy and public research institutions to carry out the activities described in subsection (b).
The Secretary shall allow the head of a relevant State agency to join the Consortium on request of the State agency. The Consortium, working through the National Laboratories and public research institutions, shall use supercomputing, machine learning, and other similar capabilities— to establish rapid approaches for large-scale identification of toxic substances and the development of safer alternatives to toxic substances by developing and validating computational toxicology methods based on unique high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and precision measurements; to address the need to identify safer chemicals for use in consumer and industrial products and in their manufacture to support the move away from toxic substances and toward safer-by-design alternatives; and to make recommendations on how the information produced can be applied in risk assessments and other characterizations for use by the Environmental Protection Agency and other agencies in regulatory decisions, and by industry in identifying toxic and safer chemicals.
In carrying out paragraph (1), the Consortium— shall use supercomputers and other virtual tools to develop, validate, and run models to predict adverse health effects caused by toxic substances and to identify safe chemicals for use in products and manufacturing; and may utilize, as needed, appropriate biological test systems to test and evaluate approaches and improve their predictability and reliability in industrial and regulatory applications. The Consortium shall make model predictions, along with supporting documentation, available to the public in an accessible format.
There is authorized to be appropriated to the Secretary to carry out this section— for fiscal year 2022, $20,000,000; for fiscal year 2023, $30,000,000; and for each of fiscal years 2024 through 2026, $35,000,000. From the amounts made available under paragraph
(1)for a fiscal year, not less than $5,000,000 shall be available to the Environmental Protection Agency.