ToxCast Data Summit

Tens of thousands of chemicals are currently in use, and hundreds more are introduced every year. Because current chemical testing is expensive and time consuming, only a small fraction of chemicals have been evaluated fully for potential human health effects. Through its computational toxicology (CompTox) research, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is working to figure out how to change the current approach used to evaluate the safety of chemicals. CompTox research integrates advances in biology, biotechnology, chemistry, and computer science to identify important biological processes that may be disrupted by the chemicals and trace those biological disruptions to a related dose and human exposure. The combined information helps prioritize chemicals based on potential human health risks. Using CompTox, thousands of chemicals can be evaluated for potential risk at a small cost in a very short amount of time.

EPA recently released new chemical screening data on 1,800 chemicals. The data is accessible through the interactive Chemical Safety for Sustainability (iCSS) Dashboards and the complete data sets are available on the ToxCast Data Download Webpage. The iCSS dashboard provides user-friendly and customizable access to data from ToxCast and Tox21 high-throughput chemical screening technologies. The chemical data is massive and new which leads to data translation, accessibility and usage challenges. To improve your satisfaction with these tools, we need your feedback and evaluation.