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Best practices for developing adverse outcome pathways
Citation:
LaLone, C. Best practices for developing adverse outcome pathways. SETAC Asia Pacific, Daegu, N/A, SOUTH KOREA, September 16 - 19, 2018.
Impact/Purpose:
The adverse outcome pathway framework presents existing and available knowledge in a specific format that allows researchers and risk assessors to more clearly understand a biological pathway that leads to injury of an individual or population. This understanding is important for understanding the risk of chemicals to humans and wildlife. This abstract and the associated presentation describe the best practices for consistently describing the biology in a manner that is most useful for scientist working to understand such risks. Further, descriptions of available tools and resources to aid scientists in this effort will be explained. This research directly supports the Chemical Safety for Sustainability Research Program Project 17.01: Adverse outcome pathway discovery and development.
Description:
The adverse outcome pathway (AOP) framework has gained international traction as a systematic approach for capturing existing knowledge to transparently link mechanistic data to apical toxicity endpoints to inform research and regulatory assessments. The advantage of the AOP framework that has resonated with the toxicology community has, in part, been the precise and harmonized terminology used to consistently describe the biological pathway. The framework captures measurable changes, termed key events (KEs), in biological state as they progress to an adverse outcome. Further, key event relationships are used to describe the causal linkages between levels of biological organization including the weight of evidence supporting those linkages. Best practices for AOP development have been captured in key publications and continue to evolve as the framework matures and practical demonstrations, in the form of case studies, are developed. These best practices will be outlined in this presentation for each component of the AOP framework and tools that guide development, such as the AOP-Wiki, will be highlighted.