Dr. Menghang Xia is a group leader of the Systems Toxicology section at the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, NIH. Serving as a co-chair in the Assays/Pathways working group of the Tox21 program, Dr. Xia led the major effort to develop and validate a battery of in vitro toxicological assays in a quantitative high throughput screening platform. Dr. Xia and her team have developed and screened more than 120 assays, and profiled environmental chemicals on various pathways and targets, such as stress response signaling, acetylcholinesterase, and nuclear receptors. Dr. Xia received Bachelor of Medicine in Shanghai Medical University in China, Ph.D. in pharmacology from the State University of New York at Buffalo, and did postdoctoral training at the University of California at San Francisco.
Use of high throughput screening assay system to identify environmental toxicants
The US Tox21 (Toxicology in the 21st century) effort represents a paradigm shift in toxicological testing of chemical compounds from traditional in vivo animal tests to less expensive and higher throughput in vitro assays that are based on target-specific mechanisms and biological observations. To assess the toxicological effects of environmental chemicals quickly and efficiently, the Tox21 Program has utilized a quantitative high throughput screening (qHTS) approach to profile thousands of environmental chemicals using a battery of in vitro assays. With advances in technology emerging, HTS in vitro assays have become popular tools for toxicological testing. This presentation will overview the Tox21 screening effort, HTS technologies used in the screening, and then give some examples of using HTS assays to assess the toxicological effects of environmental chemicals.
This research was supported in part by the Intramural/Extramural research program of the NCATS, NIH
