Emerging multi-stakeholder collaboration to cell painting supporting NGRA goals

There is a pressing need for a fundamental shift from chemical safety decisions based on apical animal endpoints toward a broader application of in vitro testing and predictive toxicology methods. Currently, there is a lot of interest and active research in developing new approach methodologies (NAMs) that can provide information of chemical hazard which combined with estimates of potential human exposure can be used to significantly reduce or avoid the use of testing in animals. It is expected that NAMs could also provide a broader range of biological mechanistic information in a shorter timeframe with fewer resources while achieving equal or greater biological predictivity than current animal models.  Technology wise, cell painting and transcriptomics have shown to be good candidates to be part of the NAMs toolbox as they are generating high density biological information while being broadly available in a cost-effective manner. Indeed, those technologies have been shown to reflect compound-induced modulation of diverse targets and biochemical processes, useful characteristics for an integrative evaluation of chemical bioactivities that have to be coupled with the determination of POD to be used in chemical safety assessment.

In this context, the talk will be on an emerging initiative in the frame of HESI. The intention of this initiative is to generate meaningful data in a cross-sector collaborative effort by profiling a large collection of in vivo tox data rich compounds (already characterized in lab animals) with cell painting and transcriptomics to gain knowledge on the in vitro to in vivo translation, hence contributing to the validation and implementation of NAMs. 

CV: I am leading the Toxicology Data Science team on the toxicology facility of Bayer Crop Science in Sophia Antipolis, France. My passion about science and research addressing societal needs kept me involved in innovative, collaborative and multidisciplinary research work. By training I am biochemist and molecular biologist, continuously metamorphosing toward a hybrid profile at the interface between biological and computational sciences. I recently joined the scientific committee of ECETOC as Bayer representative and I also have the role of Affiliate Chair 3IA Côte d’Azur University (Interdisciplinary Institute for Artificial Intelligence).