Horvat Tomislav, Landesmann Brigitte, Lostia Alfonso, Vinken Mathieu, Munn Sharon, Whelan Maurice
Chemicals Safety and Alternative Methods Unit (F.3), Directorate F - Health, Consumers and Reference Materials, Directorate General Joint Research Centre, European Commission, Ispra, Italy.
Department of In Vitro Toxicology and Dermato-Cosmetology, Center for Pharmaceutical Research, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Brussels, Belgium.
Arch Toxicol. 2017 Apr;91(4):1523-1543. doi: 10.1007/s00204-016-1814-8. Epub 2016 Aug 19.
In modern toxicology, substantial efforts are undertaken to develop alternative solutions for in vivo toxicity testing. The adverse outcome pathway (AOP) concept could facilitate knowledge-based safety assessment of chemicals that does not rely exclusively on in vivo toxicity testing. The construction of an AOP is based on understanding toxicological processes at different levels of biological organisation. Here, we present the developed AOP for liver fibrosis and demonstrate a linkage between hepatic injury caused by chemical protein alkylation and the formation of liver fibrosis, supported by coherent and consistent scientific data. This long-term process, in which inflammation, tissue destruction, and repair occur simultaneously, results from the complex interplay between various hepatic cell types, receptors, and signalling pathways. Due to the complexity of the process, an adequate liver fibrosis cell model for in vitro evaluation of a chemical's fibrogenic potential is not yet available. Liver fibrosis poses an important human health issue that is also relevant for regulatory purposes. An AOP described with enough mechanistic detail might support chemical risk assessment by indicating early markers for downstream events and thus facilitating the development of an in vitro testing strategy. With this work, we demonstrate how the AOP framework can support the assembly and coherent display of distributed mechanistic information from the literature to support the use of alternative approaches for prediction of toxicity. This AOP was developed according to the guidance document on developing and assessing AOPs and its supplement, the users' handbook, issued by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
在现代毒理学中,人们付出了巨大努力来开发体内毒性测试的替代方案。不良结局途径(AOP)概念有助于对化学品进行基于知识的安全性评估,而不仅仅依赖于体内毒性测试。AOP的构建基于对生物组织不同层面毒理学过程的理解。在此,我们展示已开发的肝纤维化AOP,并通过连贯且一致的科学数据证明化学性蛋白质烷基化所致肝损伤与肝纤维化形成之间的联系。这个长期过程中,炎症、组织破坏和修复同时发生,是多种肝细胞类型、受体和信号通路之间复杂相互作用的结果。由于该过程的复杂性,目前尚无用于体外评估化学品致纤维化潜力的合适肝纤维化细胞模型。肝纤维化是一个重要的人类健康问题,在监管方面也具有相关性。以足够详细的机制描述的AOP可能通过指明下游事件的早期标志物来支持化学风险评估,从而促进体外测试策略的开发。通过这项工作,我们展示了AOP框架如何支持整合和连贯展示来自文献的分散机制信息,以支持使用替代方法预测毒性。本AOP是根据经济合作与发展组织发布的关于开发和评估AOP的指导文件及其补充文件《用户手册》制定的。