Entering the era of “Big Data”

Entering the era of “Big Data”: defining and modeling adverse outcome by omics-driven informatics

Roland Grafström, Professor, Karolinska Institutet Presented at the 2018 OpenTox Euro Conference in Athens, Greece.

The rapidly developing “Big Data era” in toxicology involves generation of large amounts of safety testing data and the need to interpret the results relative steadily increasing amounts of related information in databases. Cell culture models serve for high-throughput screening and omics analysis, allowing libraries of drugs, chemicals, and nanomaterials to be effectively assessed and ranked for cytotoxicological properties. Mechanistic analyses of toxicity-related pathways form a key to in-vitro-only safety assessment and the emerging Adverse Outcome Pathways (AOP) concept. Our laboratory generated a “predictive toxicogenomics space (PTGS)” concept that serves to generate toxicity estimates intrinsic to omics-data via broad dose-dependent coverage of cellular toxicity reactions and mechanisms.