51st Annual Meeting & ToxExpo - Society of Toxicology

Society of Toxicology 2012
Scientific
Workshops
The Thematic Track information can be found on pages 8–9.
have led to increased food quantity and quality, but as a consequence
have also led to concerns about food safety and potential risks to
public health. These global food safety concerns range from incidental
or deliberate food contamination from micro-organisms or
toxic substances, chemicals migrating into food from food containers,
pesticide residues on food, and genetically modified foods. Our panel
of experts will highlight the science-based approaches being used to
regulate food safety in the food, chemical, and agricultural industries
across the world. To underscore the important of these issues, we will
identify opportunities for advancing technologies and science across
many sectors including academia, industry, government, and public
health organizations, to build confidence in the safety of our food to
protect human health.
• New Approaches to Assessing Safety/Risk of Chemical
Contaminants in Food. Angelika Tritscher, World Health
Organization, Geneva, Switzerland.
• Evaluating the Safety of Materials Used in Food Contact
Materials. Daniel Wilson, The Dow Chemical Company,
Midland, MI.
• Advances in Safety/Risk Assessments of Pesticide Residues on
Foods. Alan Boobis, Imperial College, London, United Kingdom.
• Regulating the Safety of Foods and Feeds Derived from
Genetically Modified Crops. Bruce Chassy, University of Illinois,
Urbana, IL.
• Risk Assessment and Management Options for Chemical
Contaminants in a Global Food Supply. Clark Carrington,
US FDA, College Park, MD.
Characterizing Toxic Modes of Action
and Pathways to Toxicity
Discovering Novel Hypotheses for Mechanisms of
Toxicity from High-Content Data Sets
Wednesday, March 14, 1:30 PM to 4:15 PM
Chairperson(s): Nigel Greene, Pfizer, Inc., Groton, CT, and Ahmed
Enayetallah, Pfizer, Inc., Groton, CT.
Sponsor:
Biological Modeling Specialty Section
Endorsed by:
Molecular Biology Specialty Section
For over a decade researchers have sought to apply technologies such
as genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics to either predict toxicity
through the use of gene, protein, or metabolite signatures or to further
understand modes of action in toxicity through chemical exposure.
There have been some success stories in recent years but largely these
technologies have not lived up to the promises made when they were
first developed. The complex nature of biological systems and the
multivariate nature of a system’s response to a xenobiotic have made
it difficult to pick apart the true causes of the phenotypic changes that
are observed. In addition, the explosion of data available in the public
domain has made it difficult for the human brain to keep up with
current knowledge and apply this effectively to a set of experimental
readouts to determine cause and effect relationships. Xenobiotics
often induce their biological effects via interactions with one or
more biological targets, thus triggering whole cascades of events that
culminate in adverse events in humans. Understanding the nature
of these events, coupled with consideration of their relevance to the
human mode of action and target context, will improve the scientific
basis and thus increase the accuracy of risk and safety assessments.
In addition, better understanding of toxicological modes of action
will ultimately lead to the development of more predictive models
of in vivo biological responses. Where these take the form of in vitro
biochemical and cell-based assays it will lead to the reduction of the
use of animals in laboratory experiments. This session will outline
some of the cutting–edge research and methodologies for distilling
down the vast array of public information into more manageable
sets of knowledge and relationships. We will discuss novel in silico
approaches to mine these relationships and formulate hypotheses for
modes of action of the compound or biological target under study and
present some applications of these methods in understanding toxicological
mechanisms.
• Predicting Mechanisms of Chemical Toxicity Using the
Comparative Toxicogenomics Database (CTD). Carolyn
Mattingly, The Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory,
Salisbury Cove, ME.
• A Novel Computational Approach for Early Prediction of
Target-Based Toxicity through Downstream Molecular Causal
Reasoning. Daphna Laifenfeld, Selventa, Inc., Cambridge, MA.
• Toxicity Biological Networks Using Causal Reasoning to
Leverage High-Throughput Quantitative SILAC Proteomics.
Ahmed Enayetallah, Pfizer, Inc., Groton, CT.
• Identifying Mechanisms of Drug-Induced Toxicity Using
Metabolomics. David F. Grant, University of Connecticut,
Storrs, CT.
Thematic Session
96
SOT’s 51 st Annual Meeting