You are here:
Adverse outcome pathways: Creating a sustainable framework for decision-making
Citation:
Lalone, C. Adverse outcome pathways: Creating a sustainable framework for decision-making. International Conference on Marine Pollution and Ecotoxicology, Hong Kong, N/A, HONG KONG, June 11 - 14, 2019.
Impact/Purpose:
The adverse outcome pathway captures existing knowledge about a biological pathway that can be used for understanding research gaps and regulatory purposes. There have been a number of advances, such as tools that have made it easier for more people to become involved in AOP development and use. A couple of useful tools include the AOP-Wiki for building AOPs and Sequence Alignment to Predict Across Species Susceptibility (SeqAPASS) for extrapolating AOP knowledge across species. There have also been efforts to bring a larger community together to develop AOPs. These efforts include global training and interaction with new or potential stakeholders, both describing AOP development and discussing current and planned applications of the AOP framework. This presentation will describe the basic elements of an AOP and resources to learn more about them, as well as describe a few tools that are useful in the context of development and dissemination of AOPs. Finally the presentation will describe what is being done to engage more stakeholders in the process.
Description:
The adverse outcome pathway (AOP) is a conceptual framework for organizing available biological information to understand how chemical and non-chemical stressors may disrupt biology and lead to adverse health or environmental effects in humans and wildlife. The framework has gained significant international traction since it was initially defined in 2010, particularly in the context of chemical safety. As the framework evolved, it was recognized that both technical and social advances were necessary to accommodate the decision-making needs of multiple stakeholders, including those in biomedical fields. Several workshops held over the years pushed the AOP framework forward in areas including development of clear terminology for AOP descriptions and associated weight of evidence and best practices for development, network analyses, development of quantitative AOPs, development of online collaborative AOP development platforms, and development of case studies working to demonstrate regulatory use of AOPs. These advances have led to new areas of research to advance methods for high-throughput screening and cross-species extrapolation. A couple of examples of tools that support these efforts include the AOP-Wiki (aopwiki.org) for development, review, and storage of AOPs and the Sequence Alignment to Predict Across Species Susceptibility (SeqAPASS; seqapass.epa.gov/seqapass/) tool for predicting biological target conservation for extrapolating toxicity data across taxa. While tools and the science continue to expand surrounding the AOP framework, important issues challenge the long-term sustainability of the framework, such as narrow contribution to AOP development from a relatively small group of scientists, slow uptake of the use of AOPs in regulatory decision making, time-consuming review and publication of AOPs to name a few. Initiatives have been proposed and are currently being advanced to create greater stakeholder engagement in the AOP framework such as incentivization to contribute to AOP development and broader global AOP training.