EPA Crowd-Sources Toxicity Analysis of 1,800 Chemicals

Hoping to accelerate chemical assessments, the Environmental Protection Agency calls on the public to help decode new screening data on hundreds of chemicals.

The chemicals were screened as a part of the Toxicity Testing in the 21st Century (Tox21) program—a federal collaboration between EPA, the National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The Tox21 program uses robotics and high-throughput screening to discover the proteins, pathways, and cellular processes that chemicals interact with when used in industrial and consumer products, food additives, or drugs. Nearly 2,000 chemicals were analyzed in 700 in vitro assays, a type of test that measures the activity of a chemical on a sample of organic tissue.

“Making these data publicly available will help researchers across disciplines to better identify hazardous chemicals,” according to Raymond Tice, Ph.D., who heads the Biomolecular Screening Branch at NIEHS. EPA is hoping to encourage that research by announcing two ToxCast challenges, which will reward teams for accurately predicting the lowest dose of a chemical that causes an adverse reaction in animals. The competitions are meant to generate solutions for how the data can be used to predict health effects; given those solutions, EPA would be better able to prioritize chemicals needed for testing under the Toxic Substance Control Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, and its Endocrine Disruption Screening Program.

For more information:

ToxCast Chemical Data Challenges

epa.gov/ncct/