CAAT Director Thomas Hartung, MD, PhD, and his team at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, along with partner Agilent Technologies and noted scientists from government and industry, received the funding for a consortium to develop a new technological methodology for mapping the molecular pathways of toxicity within cells.

Pathways that lead to adverse health effects when perturbed are referred to as pathways of toxicity (PoT). “Mapping the entirety of these pathways—which I’ve termed the ‘Human Toxome’—will be a large-scale effort, perhaps on the order of the Human Genome Project,” Hartung says.

As a first step to mapping the Human Toxome, Hartung and his collaborators have proposed comprehensively mapping the pathways of endocrine disruption, a perturbation of the hormonal system that can cause tumors, birth defects, and developmental disorders. The physiological pathways of the endocrine system are relatively well understood, making PoT identification simpler than for other potential targets.

The team will develop a common, community-accessible framework that will enable the toxicology community at large to comprehensively and cooperatively map the human toxome using integrated testing strategies that combine “omics” (transcriptomics and metabolomics) data with computational models. The consortium will also create a public database of PoT, enabling full access to researchers around the world.

Additional information may be found at: http://altweb.jhsph.edu/news/current/caatnihgrant.html