Cleber Melo-Filho is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Laboratory for Molecular Modeling at the Eshelman School of Pharmacy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He holds a Ph.D. in Tropical Medicine, an M.Sc. in Pharmaceutical Sciences, and a Bachelor’s degree in Pharmacy. He has experience in computer-aided drug design, cheminformatics, and machine learning. Over the past decade, he has worked on many multidisciplinary projects, including neglected tropical diseases and antiviral drug research, developing computational models to predict the properties of mixtures, computational glycobiology, and the application of QSAR modeling in computational toxicology.
OpenTox Summer School 2025
STopTox: In Silico NAM for Acute Systemic and Topical Toxicity
The "6-pack" battery of tests, which includes three topical endpoints (skin sensitization, skin irritation/corrosion, eye irritation/corrosion) and three systemic endpoints (acute oral toxicity, acute inhalation toxicity, and acute dermal toxicity), is the most common type of animal assays used to assess the acute toxicity of chemicals. Over the last few decades, reducing, refining, and replacing animal testing- known as the three R's- has been a major goal in chemical toxicology. The STopTox (Systemic and Topical chemical Toxicity) platform was created to achieve this objective by providing a unique in-silico alternative to traditional animal testing for assessing acute systemic and topical toxicity. STopTox predicts the toxicity of compounds using quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) models, making it a comprehensive, accessible, and user-friendly tool for hazard detection. The models were carefully evaluated during their initial development using broad publicly available data sets, ensuring conformity with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) principles. Recently, the predictive performance of STopTox was successfully demonstrated on new independent datasets across the “6-pack” endpoints. In this session, a brief overview of STopTox will be provided, followed by a demonstration of the tool’s functionalities. All participants will be encouraged to try the open-access version of the tool at https://stoptox.mml.unc.edu/.