Toxicology is a scientific discipline, overlapping with biology, chemistry, pharmacology, and medicine, that involves the study of the adverse effects of chemical substances on living organisms and the practice of diagnosing and treating exposures to toxins and toxicants. The relationship between dose and its effects on the exposed organism is of high significance in toxicology. Factors that influence chemical toxicity include the dosage, duration of exposure, route of exposure, species, age, sex, and environment. Toxicologists are experts on poisons and poisoning. There is a movement for evidence-based toxicology as part of the larger movement towards evidence-based practices. Toxicology is currently contributing to the field of cancer research, since some toxins can be used as drugs for killing tumor cells. One prime example of this is ribosome-inactivating proteins, tested in the treatment of leukemia.
Toxicity is the degree to which a chemical substance or a particular mixture of substances can damage an organism. Toxicity can refer to the effect on a whole organism, such as an animal, bacterium, or plant, as well as the effect on a substructure of the organism, such as a cell (cytotoxicity) or an organ such as the liver (hepatotoxicity). By extension, the word may be metaphorically used to describe toxic effects on larger and more complex groups, such as the family unit or society at large. Sometimes the word is more or less synonymous with poisoning in everyday usage.
The Draize test is an acute toxicity test devised in 1944 by Food and Drug Administration (FDA) toxicologists John H. Draize and Jacob M. Spines. Initially used for testing cosmetics, the procedure involves applying 0.5 mL or 0.5 g of a test substance to the eye or skin of a restrained, conscious animal, and then leaving it for set amount of time before rinsing it out and recording its effects. The animals are observed for up to 14 days for signs of erythema and edema in the skin test, and redness, swelling, discharge, ulceration, hemorrhaging, cloudiness, or blindness in the tested eye. The test subject is commonly an albino rabbit, though other species are used too, including dogs. The animals are euthanized after testing if the test renders irreversible damage to the eye or skin. Animals may be re-used for testing purposes if the product tested causes no permanent damage. Animals are typically reused after a "wash out" period during which all traces of the tested product are allowed to disperse from the test site.
In vitro toxicity testing is the scientific analysis of the toxic effects of chemical substances on cultured bacteria or mammalian cells. In vitro testing methods are employed primarily to identify potentially hazardous chemicals and/or to confirm the lack of certain toxic properties in the early stages of the development of potentially useful new substances such as therapeutic drugs, agricultural chemicals and food additives.
The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) is a federal public health agency within the United States Department of Health and Human Services. The agency focuses on minimizing human health risks associated with exposure to hazardous substances. It works closely with other federal, state, and local agencies; tribal governments; local communities; and healthcare providers. Its mission is to "Serve the public through responsive public health actions to promote healthy and safe environments and prevent harmful exposures." ATSDR was created as an advisory, nonregulatory agency by the Superfund legislation and was formally organized in 1985.
The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) conducts research into the effects of the environment on human disease, as one of the 27 institutes and centers of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It is located in the Research Triangle Park in North Carolina, and is the only primary division of the NIH located outside of the Washington metropolitan area.
Toxicogenomics is a subdiscipline of pharmacology that deals with the collection, interpretation, and storage of information about gene and protein activity within a particular cell or tissue of an organism in response to exposure to toxic substances. Toxicogenomics combines toxicology with genomics or other high-throughput molecular profiling technologies such as transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics. Toxicogenomics endeavors to elucidate the molecular mechanisms evolved in the expression of toxicity, and to derive molecular expression patterns that predict toxicity or the genetic susceptibility to it.
David Platt Rall was a cancer specialist and a leader in environmental health studies, whose work in environmental health helped turn it into a scientific discipline. Rall also advanced public health and prevention. He directed the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences from 1971 to 1990, year in which he retired. His work on toxicology and carcinogenesis was recognized by his appointment as the first director of the National Toxicology Program in 1978. He held the rank of Assistant Surgeon General in the United States Public Health Service. He also chaired the World Health Organization's Program on Chemical Safety.
The National Toxicology Program (NTP) is an inter-agency program run by the United States Department of Health and Human Services to coordinate, evaluate, and report on toxicology within public agencies.
In the experimental (non-clinical) research arena, good laboratory practice or GLP is a quality system of management controls for research laboratories and organizations to ensure the uniformity, consistency, reliability, reproducibility, quality, and integrity of products in development for human or animal health through non-clinical safety tests; from physio-chemical properties through acute to chronic toxicity tests.
Alternatives to animal testing are the development and implementation of test methods that avoid the use of live animals.
The fixed-dose procedure (FDP), proposed in 1992 by the British Toxicology Society, is a method to assess a substance's acute oral toxicity.
High production volume chemicals are produced or imported into the United States in quantities of 1 million pounds or 500 tons per year. In OECD countries, HPV chemicals are defined as being produced at levels greater than 1,000 metric tons per producer/importer per year in at least one member country/region. A list of HPV chemicals serves as an overall priority list, from which chemicals are selected to gather data for a screening information dataset (SIDS), for testing and for initial hazard assessment.
The Pest Management Regulatory Agency (PMRA) is the Canadian government agency responsible for the regulation of pest control products in Canada under the federal authority of the Pest Control Products Act and Regulations. The agency is a branch that reports to Parliament through Health Canada. The PMRA is responsible for providing access to pest management tools while minimizing the risks to human health and the environment by “using modern evidence-based scientific approaches to pesticide regulation, in an open and transparent manner”. Their main activity areas include: new product evaluation, post market review and compliance and enforcement.
The International Organization for Standardization defines Engineered Nanomaterials, or ENMS, as materials with external dimensions between 1 and 100nm, the nanoscale, or having an internal surface structure at these dimensions. Nanoparticles can be both incidental and engineered. Incidental nanoparticles include particles from dust storms, volcanic eruptions, forest fires, and ocean water evaporation. Engineered nanoparticles (EMMs) are nanoparticles that are made for use in cosmetics or pharmaceuticals like ZnO and TiO2. They are also found from sources such as cigarette smoke and building demolition. Engineered nanoparticles have become increasingly important for many applications in consumer and industrial products, which has resulted in an increased presence in the environment. This proliferation has instigated a growing body of research into the effects of nanoparticles on the environment.
The New England Anti-Vivisection Society (NEAVS) is a national, registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization "dedicated to ending the use of animals in research, testing, and science education" and replacing them with "modern alternatives that are ethically, humanely, and scientifically superior."
The non-profit Evidence-based Toxicology Collaboration (EBTC) comprises a group of scientists and experts with ties to governmental and non-governmental agencies, chemical and pharmaceutical companies, and academia that have banded together to promote the use of what are known as "evidence-based approaches" in toxicology. The discipline of evidence-based toxicology (EBT) is a process for transparently, consistently, and objectively assessing available scientific evidence in order to answer questions in toxicology. EBT has the potential to address concerns in the toxicological community about the limitations of current approaches. These include concerns related to transparency in decision making, synthesis of different types of evidence, and the assessment of bias and credibility. The evidence-based methods and approaches now being proposed for toxicology are widely used in medicine, which is the basis for their nomenclature. The need to improve how the performance of toxicological test methods is assessed was the main impetus for translating these tools to toxicology.
An adverse outcome pathway (AOP) is structured representation of biological events leading to adverse effects and is considered relevant to risk assessment. The AOP links in a linear way existing knowledge along one or more series of causally connected key events (KE) between two points — a molecular initiating event (MIE) and an adverse outcome (AO) that occur at a level of biological organization relevant to risk assessment. The linkage between the events is described by key event relationships (KER) that describe the causal relationships between the key events.
The German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment, abbreviated BfR, is a body under public law of the German federal government with full legal capacity. The institute comes under the portfolio of the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture and has the task of providing scientific advice to the federal government on issues relating to food safety, product safety, chemical safety, contaminants in the food chain, animal protection and consumer health protection. Further technical supervision is performed by the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Nuclear Safety and the Federal Ministry of Transport.
A bioassay is an analytical method to determine the concentration or potency of a substance by its effect on living animals or plants, or on living cells or tissues. A bioassay can be either quantal or quantitative, direct or indirect. If the measured response is binary, the assay is quantal, if not, it is quantitative.
