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High-Throughput Toxicity Testing: New Strategies for Assessing Chemical Safety
Citation:
Baghdikian, C. AND A. Karmaus. High-Throughput Toxicity Testing: New Strategies for Assessing Chemical Safety. Food Safety Magazine. The Target Group, Inc., Glendale, CA, (Dec./Jan.):1-2, (2016).
Impact/Purpose:
This article is an invited contribution to the Food Safety Magazine. The intention is to provide the food industry audience with an overview of the ToxCast program.
Description:
In recent years, the food industry has made progress in improving safety testing methods focused on microbial contaminants in order to promote food safety. However, food industry toxicologists must also assess the safety of food-relevant chemicals including pesticides, direct additives, and food contact substances. With the rapidly growing use of new food additives, as well as innovation in food contact substance development, an interest in exploring the use of high-throughput chemical safety testing approaches has emerged. Currently, the field of toxicology is undergoing a paradigm shift in how chemical hazards can be evaluated. Since there are tens of thousands of chemicals in use, many of which have little to no hazard information and there are limited resources (namely time and money) for testing these chemicals, it is necessary to prioritize which chemicals require further safety testing to better protect human health. Advances in biochemistry and computational toxicology have paved the way for animal-free (in vitro) high-throughput screening which can characterize chemical interactions with highly specific biological processes. Screening approaches are not novel; in fact, quantitative high-throughput screening (qHTS) methods that incorporate dose-response evaluation have been widely used in the pharmaceutical industry. For toxicological evaluation and prioritization, it is the throughput as well as the cost- and time-efficient nature of qHTS that makes it ideal for the dose-dependent evaluation of thousands of chemicals for potential biological activity. This article summarizes ongoing efforts in the ToxCast and Tox21 qHTS programs that screen thousands, including food-relevant chemicals such as direct additives, food contact substances and pesticides, across hundreds of assays.
