Prediction of Human Population Responses to Toxic Compounds by a Collaborative Competition

12/2015

As part of an open community challenge within the Dialogue on Reverse Engineering Assessment and Methods (DREAM) framework, researchers were challenged to design a method to predict toxicity response of individuals and across populations. 

Cellular toxicity was analyzed for 156 compounds utilizing lymphoblastoid lines from the 1000 Genomes Project from nine subpopulations. Teams of researchers submitted predictive data based on state-of-the-art computational models. 

The most promising of these results was pooled together to create a new tool to predict toxicity. While this tool could only predict toxicity in individuals at a rate slightly better than random, toxicity in populations could be roughly estimated. This research shows that further investigation is necessary in the area of compound toxicity prediction, as the results have the potential to be useful in the areas of public and occupational health.

Find more information about this research in Nature Biotechnology or here in Science Daily.


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