Adverse Outcome Pathways (AOP) are becoming a fashionable term in the toxicological risk assessment stage. But what does AOP mean? Most important, to what purpose we could use AOPs?

AOP describe the chain of events from the first interaction of any chemical with a molecular target to an adverse outcome; this could be either an effect detected in regulatory toxicity testing, or a health disorder observed in humans, domestic animals or wildlife. Therefore, the ambition of the AOPs conceptual framework is to build a new paradigm of toxicological testing, based on the keywords ‘relevance’ and ‘predictivity’. Any chemical triggering an upstream molecular/cellular event with sufficient intensity is flagged as a chemical able to perturb adversely a physiological pathway, and therefore induce a certain kind of toxicity. Definitely, a facinating aspect of AOP are the potential cross-talk and cross-fertilization between toxicology and biomedicine, a field which is making impressive steps forward. But, how AOP can, in practice, improve oxicity testing and toxicological risk assessment?

The key learning objective of the education course on AOP within the 46^th ETS Conference is to illustrate strengths, opportunities, limitations and uncertainties of the use of AOP, based on practical experiences in three key areas of the risk assessment of chemical substances, namely: pesticides, endocrine disrupting chemicals and pharmaceuticals.

Berlin will be the venue for the 46th Annual Meeting of the European Teratology Society, which will be held on Monday 10^th to Thursday 13^th September 2018.

Budapest will be the venue for the 45th Annual Meeting of the European Teratology Society, which will be held on Monday 4^th to Thursday 7^th September 2017.

Dublin was the venue for the 44th Annual Meeting of the European Teratology Society, which has been held on 11th to 14th September 2016.

The FDA has published a new Guidance for Industry on the Assessment of Male-Mediated Developmental Risk for Pharmaceuticals:

http://www.fda.gov/downloads/Drugs/GuidanceComplianceRegulatoryInformation/Guidances/UCM450627.pdf

In 2014, the Sustaining Membership Scheme was created. The aim of the Sustaining Membership Scheme is to encourage, educate, and support our Young Scientist to become the "Teratologists of Tomorrow". This will be achieved through small research bursaries, travel grants, and reduced registration fees at our annual meetings.

• Amsterdam has been the venue for the 43rd Annual Meeting of the European Teratology Society, which was held on 30th August – 3rd September 2015.