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JRC Data Visualization: Extrapolating from acute to chronic toxicity in vitro

An important question that was addressed within the EU-ToxRisk project relates to the extrapolation from acute to chronic effects of toxicants.

An important question that was addressed within the EU-ToxRisk project relates to the extrapolation from acute to chronic effects of toxicants. Traditionally, such information has been provided by a set of animal studies conducted over different durations, ranging from a single dose with the observation of effects over a few days, to repeat daily dosing and observations made over many months. With the advent of modern mechanistic approaches to toxicology, the role of in vitro studies within alternative approaches has never been more prominent. Generation of concentration-time-effect responses allows both the extrapolation of points of departure from an acute to chronic exposure and the determination of a chronicity index that provides a quantitative measure of a chemical's potential to cause cumulative effects over time. 

As a part of the EU-ToxRisk project, the cytotoxicity assays were run at the Joint Research Centre (JRC) in Ispra, Italy for a set of compounds. The dose-response profiles at multiple time points within the 72 hours allow us to predict IC50 values on a longer timescale and hence predict the effect of the compound upon chronic exposure. 

Good data management practices adopted within the EU-ToxRisk project allowed us to make laboratory-generated data sets easily available through web requests and hence accessible directly from the browser. In this way, we can create interactive visualizations of processed data sets that give a great user experience and are shareable simply by copying a URL link. Such a notebook was prepared for the cytotoxicity data sets generated at the JRC within the EU-ToxRisk project. 

View recording from the recent SWBD/JRC webinar:

This notebook (created by Tomaz Mohoric and Sarolta Gabulya, Edelweiss Connect) demonstrates how data from in vitro acute toxicity assays on cells from JRC can be visualized and analyzed. A subset of the data has been published through EdelweissData

Notebook link: https://observablehq.com/@tomazm/jrc-data-visualization