PhD Conferral Mr. drs. Sander Dik

Keywords: work-related asthma, test strategy, substances, computer models

"Towards a testing strategy for the identification of respiratory sensitizing chemicals"

Asthma in the workplace is a major problem worldwide. The studies constituting this dissertation provide more insight into work-related asthma and offer tools for developing a test strategy to detect substances causing this type of asthma. Computer models, a chemical analysis and a biological analysis were used to achieve this goal. Each of these methods were shown to be useful yet insufficient when applied separately. However, the combination of these methods allows far more substances to be assessed more accurately in terms of predicting whether or not they cause work-related asthma.