Priority Setting for Testing Chemicals

It is necessary to set priorities for testing chemicals because there are many thousand chemicals in commercial use, only a few thousand of which have been tested adequately, and limited resources with which to test them. Moreover, there are dozens of effects to test for, (e.g. carcinogenesis, mutagenesis, fetotoxicity) and hundreds of tests to choose from. The priority problem is to choose which chemicals to test first and to choose which tests to employ. The approach of this paper is to design an optimal priority process (for a given year) by maximizing the value of information obtained from testing, subject to a budget constraint.