Johns Hopkins University, Bloomberg School of Public Health, Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing (CAAT), Baltimore, MD 21205, USA.
ALTEX. 2012;29(2):119-28. doi: 10.14573/altex.2012.2.119.
The need for a more mechanistic understanding of the ways in which chemicals modulate biological pathways is urgent if we are to identify and better assess safety issues relating to a wide range of substances developed by the pharmaceutical, chemical, agri-bio, and cosmetic industries. Omics technologies provide a valuable opportunity to refine existing methods and provide information for so-called integrated testing strategies via the creation of signatures of toxicity. By mapping these signatures to underlying pathways of toxicity, some of which have been identified by toxicologists over the last few decades, and bringing them together with pathway information determined from biochemistry and molecular biology, a "systems toxicology" approach will enable virtual experiments to be conducted that can improve the prediction of hazard and the assessment of compound toxicity.
如果我们要识别和更好地评估与制药、化学、农业生物和化妆品等行业开发的各种物质有关的安全问题，那么急需更深入地了解化学物质调节生物途径的方式。组学技术为改进现有方法提供了宝贵的机会，并通过创建毒性特征为所谓的综合测试策略提供信息。通过将这些特征映射到毒性的潜在途径上，其中一些途径是毒理学家在过去几十年中确定的，并将它们与从生物化学和分子生物学中确定的途径信息结合起来，一种“系统毒理学”方法将能够进行虚拟实验，从而提高对危害的预测和化合物毒性的评估。
