How ToxCast Fits Into CompTox Research (view larger)
- Overview
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- ToxCast Database
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ToxCast™
Screening Chemicals to Predict Toxicity Faster and Better
EPA launched ToxCast in 2007 to develop ways to predict potential toxicity and to develop a cost-effective approach for prioritizing the thousands of chemicals that need toxicity testing.
- Toxcast uses advanced science tools to help understand how human body processes are impacted by exposures to chemicals and helps determine which exposures are most likely to lead to adverse health effects.
- Toxcast testing methods include over 650 state-of-the-art rapid tests (called high-throughput assays) that are screening 2,000 environmental chemicals for potential toxicity.
- Phase I, “Proof of Concept”, was completed in 2009 and it profiled over 300 well studied chemicals (primarily pesticides).
- Phase I chemicals have over 30 years worth of existing toxicity data since they have been tested already using traditional toxicology methods (primarily animal studies). Data from animal studies can be searched and queried using EPA's Toxicity Reference Database (ToxRefDB) that stores nearly $2 billion worth of studies.
- Phase II is currently screening 1,000 chemicals from a broad range of sources including industrial and consumer products, food additives and drugs that never made it to the market to evaluate the predictive toxicity signatures developed in Phase I.
- Data from the high-throughput assays is available via the ToxCast Database.
- Toxicity signatures from ToxCast are defined and evaluated by how well they predict outcomes from mammalian toxicity tests and identify toxicity pathways relevant to human health effects.
- Toxcast provides the Tox21 collaboration access to ToxCast’s high-throughput screening data and chemical library to increase the data available on the nearly 10,000 chemicals being studied.